It may seem obvious, but better people usually produce better results. Great thinking Einstein! However, we are often not dealt the cards we want when a project team is assembled. The dream team are the best communicators, popular folks for every department affected, you get your pick of course.
Reality sets in and assignments are often made based on who is available, not necessarily the most qualified for the role. As a Project Manager you have to deal with this tactfully and carefully. Providing you have a good plan, inform the team members of their role, manage the project well, everything could be fine. In fact it often is the case. However, there are those cases where we just have the wrong person in the wrong role.
When this happens, project managers will do one of a few things:
- Ignore the situation and hope that it/they go away
- Work around the person themselves taking on the work of the underperforming individual
- Take charge and ask for an reassignment of that role
- Some of all of the above
Perhaps it’s the nature of distributed management but it continues to amaze me how many limit their response to 1 and 2. A good project manager knows their bandwidth capabilities, but at the end of the day, the project and it’s problem team members still have to managed.
