Page 213 - Global Project Management Handbook

10-2 COMPETENCY FACTORS IN PROJECT MANAGEMENT

of the project. On top of this, some employees display symptoms of stress and burnout.
It seems very difficult for company management to balance ideas, wishes, and demands
with the resource capacity of the organization. Since it may be difficult to choose among
promising project proposals and running projects, many managers (at all levels) are con-
stantly seeking more efficient ways to make use of the resources, not least the human
resources the employees posses. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how it is possible
to influence employees in a project-oriented company in ways that make them, at the
same time, perform well and enjoy working for the company, thus taking care of and sup-
porting the human resources over the short and long term.
In the project management literature, human resources are understood and conceptual-
ized as calendar time booked for the projects. The underlying assumption is that a formal
agreement on providing a certain number of personnel hours to the project in question will
provide the project with sufficient contributions in form of work effort, knowledge, atten-
tion, etc. This assumption seems to be too simple because many projects are not accom-
plished in a satisfying manner even though project plans are worked out and staffing of the
project with competent team members is done. Instead of discussing project performance
by means of having sufficient human resources in form of calendar time, performance by
means of having enough human energy will be discussed in this chapter.
Human energy is difficult to define and measure. It is intangible and impossible to
quantify in the same manner as calendar time can be quantified. It has to do with enthusiasm,
attention, competencies, motivation, commitment, and capacity. However, being energetic/
full of energy is not a stable state. The level changes from one person to another, but it
certainly also changes over time for a single individual. It may change during the day, the
week, the month, or the year. Even though it is hard to conceptualize, it is easy to feel
whether a person is energized or not in his or her work on a specific task or project. The
same holds true for a team as a whole.
Human energy relates a lot to motivation. Motivation is not an easy concept either. It
can be defined as “an invisible inner force that drives a person to act” (Andersen, 2005,
p. 293; author’s translation). In the project management literature, motivation of a team
member is not discussed very thoroughly. The reason may be that the mere act of being
assigned to a project is assumed to be motivational in itself. Projects are assumed to be
attractive owing to the fact that they are very goal-oriented, task- and action-oriented, and
unique when it comes to process and/or result. Relating a job as a project team member
or project manager to a very well-known model, the job-characteristic model, offered by

Hackman and Oldham (1975), a project participant provides high scores on all the job
core dimensions mentioned in the model (i.e., autonomy, skill variety, task identity, task
significance, work feedback, friendship opportunities, and initiated task interdepen-
dence). Therefore, project work is supposed to lead to fulfilment of critical psychological
states and thereby be motivational in itself. Another reason why motivation is not a sig-
nificant part of the project management literature may be that the theoretical roots are
grounded in engineering science (Packendorff, 1995; Söderlund, 2002) and a planning
perspective (Eskerod, 1997, 1998) or a task perspective (Andersen, 2005) and thereby not
emphasizing the humans involved (very much).
This chapter rests on the assumption that both employees and managers in a project-
oriented company would gain from a deeper understanding on how certain ways of man-
aging the project portfolio and the single projects influence the energy of the people
involved in the projects and thereby also accomplishment of the projects. Of course, man-
agement is only one of many internal and external factors influencing the accomplish-
ment of projects. However, discussing other factors is outside the scope of this chapter.
The structure of this chapter is as follows: In the second section, a research project,
“The Project Effective Company,” on which the chapter is based is presented. The
research project included empirical studies in 30 companies. Based on the study, two new