The Art of Assignment

In our most recent article, we talked about how to schedule tasks using project charts. If you read it then you already have a good idea of how to correctly order and prioritize tasks. In today’s article we’re going to discuss how to build a team around your project and appropriately assign tasks to your team.

We begin our entry today with an example project, designing a new website for a product offering, expressed as a mind map:

I haven’t fully decomposed all of the tasks involved in this project for the sake of keeping the example short; in practice, you should always decompose your tasks into very small, specific tasks. Our project looks relatively straightforward—we have some people who have to work on content production, some on artwork and design, some on IT infrastructure, and some on outright marketing activities.

I’m going to repeat what we did last time and create a project chart which illustrates the dependencies and start dates of all of our tasks:

I cut off some of the Gantt Bars—otherwise the image wouldn’t fit within the blog’s template. But I don’t think they’re really necessary for this lesson. So what do we know about how we’re actually going to implement our project so far?

• Duration – we know how long each task is going to take.
• Task Sequence – we know which tasks are dependent on others and which tasks can be completed at the same time as others.

One of the things that we hinted at in the last article was the concept of how resource constraints can affect your delivery dates. In today’s article, we’re going to address the issue of human resource constraints.

First, let’s talk about the “proper” way to set up a team.

Using Your Organization’s Established Roles to Build Project Teams

Let’s suppose my org chart looked like this:

This is what my organization looks like. My project is to launch a new website for a new product that we are offering, so I’m going to make sure that I assign the correct tasks to the appropriate people based upon their job descriptions.

Projects shouldn’t be treated like some alien groups of tasks; the tasks from projects should be assigned according to people’s job descriptions just like any other assignment. If your project requires that something be shipped, have the usual shipping person fulfill that role on your project team. If your project requires some new pieces of graphical art, have your graphic artist take care of it. This is straight forward.

The correct tool to use to take people from your organization and form them into a team to complete a project is a team chart. Here’s what a team chart for this project would look like:

Let’s take a look at how I formed my team using the roles found on my org chart:

• Content Planning – The project aimed at launching a new website to promote a new product; the person who will be planning the content for this website is obviously going to be our VP of Product Development, Torsha Rhodes. The new product is her baby, she knows it better than anyone, and it should be her who specifies how the website sells the product to new customers.
• IT – The IT tasks are divided amongst the members of the IT team. Michael Jones, our system administrator, is responsible for managing the hardware and Leah Svenkin, our web developer, is responsible for handling any back-end programming needed to get the website off of the ground.
• Design – Herb Gosher, our webmaster, is in charge of building the graphical layout for every page on the website for the new product.
• Graphic Artwork – Chet Barre, our visual media specialist, is in charge of putting together all of the product photography and video demonstrations.
• Copywriting & Content Production – Jon Ramirez, our copywriter, follows the content plan produced by Torsha and produces the written content itself.

Putting a team together isn’t complicated—treat tasks from any project just like any other tasks that might come up during the course of your daily activities. Don’t force people to move out of their organizational roles just because they’re part of a project; instead, issue the assignments to accommodate their roles.

Human Resource Conflicts and How They Affect Scheduling

Now that I have my team together I’m going to add my team members as resources to the “resources column” on my project chart:

Click here to view the full Gantt chart – it might help clarify some of the examples below.

In the mindset of project planning, that’s how we view our team members: as resources. Just like any other necessary resource for a project, we have to determine if those resources will be available on the days that we have set on our project chart.

What would happen if it turned out that Torsha was gone for the entire week beginning on November 3^rd? With the exception of the IT team, everyone else is dependent on her content planning. What happens to our project? We have to respect the dependencies on the project chart—they cannot be changed, so the only thing we can do is push the project start date back.

On the flip side, what would happen if the IT team had a more critical project due by November 5^th and they couldn’t start work on the project until two days later than projected? As it turns out, this delay wouldn’t impact the final delivery date of the project at all as the IT team’s deliverable would still be completed many days before Jon Ramirez is done producing all of the content.

The issue here is that after you set your project chart and assign team members to specific tasks, you must confer with them to determine if there will be any work stoppages or delays along the way and plan accordingly. What most project planners fail to do is account for team members who are committed to other ongoing assignments; thus, the deadlines for those over-committed team members are unrealistically short if the project manager fails to accommodate the delivery dates for those other commitments. Your project does not exist in a vacuum.

Next time we’ll cover how to properly set milestones and delivery dates.

If you want to try making your own team charts, project charts, org charts, and mind maps, then try a free trial of SmartDraw.

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