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One effective way to do this is to work with each team member to develop a performance
plan, which is simply a list of goals that the manager and team member agree to.

People need to feel that they understand what is expected of them. The purpose of the
performance plan is to set standards that are fair and attainable, and that are developed
with the involvement of the team member (when possible). Your team members will feel
more comfortable with their jobs if they feel they are being asked to meet reasonable goals
and perform within their abilities. On the other hand, when someone does not know
what is expected of him, you may feel he is doing a poor job when, in reality, he simply
does not know what you expect of him. (You may not know, either—which is another
reason a performance plan is useful!)

The manager should measure each team member’s progress in meeting the goals listed in
the performance plan. If the organization’s operating environment changes, the manager
should work with the team members to change those goals.
In many organizations, team members do not report directly to project managers; rather,
they report to people who manage development or QA groups in the organization. How-
ever, a project team member whose goals are poorly defined or in conflict with the objec-
tives of the project can threaten the project’s success. When the success of the project is
threatened, it is the project manager’s responsibility to remove the threat. This may
require that the project manager help the direct manager establish a performance plan.

You may find that your project team members’ professional goals, set by their direct man-
agers, conflict with the objectives of your project. For example, a programmer on your
team may feel that meeting the deadlines for delivering code is more important than car-
rying out code reviews and unit testing, which he sees as optional, “extraneous” activities.
By failing to do code reviews and build unit tests, he meets his personal deadlines, but he
causes the project to be late because it spends more time in testing. If the programmer
reports to a development manager, for example, it is your job to bring this up with that
manager. One way that you can suggest that he fix the problem is by building a perfor-
mance plan that includes goals that are quality related.
It is important to correct performance problems as early as possible. Many project manag-

ers make the mistake of waiting until the end of a project to try to address performance
issues. If a team member is not doing his job properly, the project manager may not have
the authority to fire or discipline the team member. But he can have that team member
removed from his project, if he is unable to correct that person’s behavior by either deal-
ing directly with the team member or going to the direct manager. By addressing the prob-
lem as early as possible, the project manager limits the risk to the project.

254 CHAPTER TEN