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132 ROLE-BASED NEEDS FOR RESOURCES

meant that a firm had to go outside the immediate organization to obtain re-
sources with the proper skills to perform committed work. Furthermore, these
temporary workers and many of the regular staff might be located off-site, or at
least remotely from their managers. Communication, always a critical factor for
project success, became more difficult.

Impact of the Changing Environment

Now, let’s look at what may be a typical scenario for today’s participants in proj-
ects. They are temporarily assigned to one or more projects. They may not work
directly for the performing organization. They are located remotely from senior
management, taking direction from a team leader. They are independently
minded, knowing that their skills are in demand and that they have a choice of
where to work.

Even in a more structured environment, there has been resistance to sup-
porting traditional project control activities, such as statusing and time report-
ing. How then, in this more informal environment, do we get today’s individual
contributors to support traditional project and resource management activi-
ties? Certainly, as we pay greater attention to the human resources involved
in projects, we must recognize that there are many diverse roles and that
our tools must address the needs of each. Also, we must make the process
as simple and nonlaborious as possible. And one more thing: I have found
that people are much more willing to provide information to a system when
that system can also provide information to them that allows them to be in-
formed contributors.

The Participant Groups

In our introduction we chose to define three classifications of roles associated
with project management. These are: the Management groups; the Participant
groups; and other Stakeholders. We looked at the roles of the Management
groups. Now, we look at the next classification, the Participant groups.

Here we are talking about the people who are directly involved in the proj-
ects. These are people who would likely be charging time to the projects (if
time keeping is in effect). These are people directly involved in planning the
work and in providing status. We can split these into subgroups, based on the
degree of involvement with the project information system. The key project
team members or leaders of the primary supporting functions would require
greater access to the system than those primarily providing status and time-
spent data.