Blog post due 11/15

In terms of conflicts that arise surrounding the context of group dynamics as depicted in chapter 8 of Bolman and Deal, it seems that the situations I have seen and experienced are not necessarily unique but repeated and identified phenomena within organizations. In the first project I had experienced in an RSO that provides consulting services, there was no singular conflict that had arisen but the project manager’s conduct and disposition had taken a toll on the performance of the team as a whole throughout the semester-long project. I believe that through the use of the reading for this post it will be much easier to state clearly. 

The main issue that had bogged down the entire team during the entirety of the project had been that the project manager had been overbearing, over-controlling, as well as seemed to really enjoy micromanaging. In the book, a model from Argyris and Schön that describes theories for action describes one of the possible core values to be “Define and achieve your goals” (Bolman & Deal 161). This value seems to be the one that best defines the source of the issue with my project manager. I believe that this is the source of the issue because an action strategy that is derived from that core value in the model is to “Design and manage the environment unilaterally” (161). That seems to be an objective and succinct way to describe the action strategies from the project manager. 

In order to describe the situation from both sides, I have to imagine what would be going through the mind of my manager during the project. From the perspective of my manager, I am guessing that their number one priority had been to achieve the goals set within the scoping document that had been created in collaboration with the client at the beginning of the semester. They had a goal with an action plan, and wanted to focus on following it to a T. If anything in the project had gone out of line of the steps to achieve the goal of the action plan, it is their responsibility to bring it back on track to follow it and achieve the goal for the client. From my own perspective, it had seemed that the plan laid out had some assumptions as to how things would go in order to achieve the next step. I had wanted to give the client actionable deliverables for the goals they wanted to achieve. Throughout the project, some assumptions made of both the client and how research would go had been incorrect. The client had wanted to change the direction of the project and the research had been hard to come by as the company had been in a very unique situation. The team had understood this and been ready to adapt for the needs of the client. This should have caused the scope of the project to shift. The project manager had not allowed for this as they had pigeon-holed themselves into the scope of the project. They had pushed back on changing the timeline and goals of the project wanting to stay within the original scope, the client ended up meeting with members of the leadership of the organization multiple times however the leadership had rejected the client as well. From my perspective the team had seen the changing goals of the project as completely feasible however the project manager had stuck to their “Define and achieve your goals” mentality too strongly. 

Ultimately, the project had ended up as lower quality and had lower actionability for the client than it could have. There was no real resolve except for the project had ended on a less positive note that it could have. If the project manager had been willing to adapt as new information had arisen and goals had changed, the entire issue could have been avoided and both the team and client would have been better off. 

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanNovember 18, 2019 at 5:32 AM

    I've had a bit of project management training when I worked in the campus IT organization. I'm under the impression that there is a specific change management process built in, though it was designed to be less than fully flexible, to make sticking with the original plan a likely outcome, as that would encourage design of the original plan to matter more. With that as background, here are a few questions.

    1. How much training did group members have in project management? Likewise, how much prior experience did group members have?

    2. Was the project manager new at this or had he done that job on a prior project?

    3. While I can understand that you don't want to give away the details of this project, can you speak a little about why the client changed their minds regarding the project?

    My sense of micromanaging for inexperienced people is that it's motivated by fear of the bad outcome. So it ends up projecting that fear onto others in the group. In this sense it may be different than the micromanaging done by a more experienced and substantially older project manager. That older person might really be a control freak. The younger one may simply not get that delegating responsibility can improve productivity. The older one simply doesn't care.

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  2. Arnold Harberger Econ 490November 19, 2019 at 9:48 PM

    1. There is little formal training to be a project manager, one must be in the organization for a minimum of 2 semesters to apply though. In terms of experience of the consultants, the turn over rate in the organization is relatively high so many were new but for some it was their 2nd semester.

    2. It was the project manager's first time being in the role.

    3. The client had been a start-up company, and much of what was in the project scope wasn't really actionable until the company had gotten a lot farther along. The client wanted a project with recommendations they could use to solve their current problems and not just potential problems in the future.

    It's interesting that you point out that inexperience may play a large role in why the project manager had acted this way. I could see this as a possibility and I haven't considered it yet, however there were never really any moments throughout the semester that the manager had seemed like they were anxious or fearful about the outcome of the project outside of being controlling. If this was the core of the issue they did a very good job of hiding it.

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