Contracting with resources

The necessity of finding a working measurement is a key value for Risk Management. Only if the actual position is known is possible to gauge the distance toward the target.

Nevertheless, the most precious resources (i.e. people) do not love the idea of contracting their performances. In my experience, the best performing teams are working on undisclosed rules; sometimes the tacitness of the agreement for doing the best is the secret formula for keeping everyone bound to the mission. Everyone is accountable for his/her teammate.

Formalizing the contract

There is an interesting post from Tom Ferguson (PM Hut) about the importance of drawing up a psychological contract between the Project Manager and each member. My first impression is that leadership is just this. A leading person can bind every person who forms his/her group with a special liaison where each part feels obliged to spend his/her own energies in order to fulfill the promise that represents the core of the contract itself.

The contract can take a written form where specific parts of the output are assigned to the person/group. In this case, he/she becomes responsible and accountable (see yesterday’s post) of the delivery. His/her own accountability has to be supported by the satisfactorily working conditions; therefore, any fault caused by an external factor is communicated to the PM, who will act to remove the limit.

In this “possible” scenario, communications are mostly focused on facts that can be easily split between within and outside the person capacity. However, if the boundary is set within the group itself, the reason of the group as an entity is challenged.

The contract frailty

Every project has its own specific environment; sometimes the resources have different “commercial” positions (e.g. from freelance to employee); moreover, the opportunity of shielding the team from external requests is not very easy or just feasible.

Team members are stakeholders. All of them are bound to the project’s success with the different means. Most of them are based on the economic factor (e.g. wages, bonuses, working hours ); often they are outreach of the PM authority. The offer of protection (please put aside the “Godfather”) from the PM contains the risk of promising something that could not be fulfilled.

Conclusion

I left a congratulation message to Tom for his idea. My opinion is marred by the fact that, working as freelance, my power has to be negotiated very carefully. Making empty promises could be extremely dangerous.