What Drives Project People?

Its difficult to really put your finger on the subject of stakeholder interests. It is more a guessing game than a science, so we need to make as much sense of the topic as we can. I conducted a small study on visitors to my website who work on software projects, in an effort to gain some insight into what actually drives project people. From the results, I came up with five aspects that affected almost 80% of the responses. Read them, and when analyzing a particular stakeholder, try to see in what way each of these aspects affects that person.

The five aspects that drive project people are:

1. Process versus. Content
2. Reference Group
3. Change versus. Status Quo
4. Defined versus Creative
5. Group versus Individual

1. Process versus Content

A big difference among stakeholders involved in your project is their preference for either the process or the content. Taking this distinction to its extreme, consider a senior manager who gets his thrills by changing the entire organization, and then think about the programmer who lights up when discussing network protocols. Process fetishists can generally be found working at higher levels of the organization. They are into the game of projects, and its the journey that they most enjoy. Content lovers, on the other hand, can be found at the more operational levels, most of the time constituting the people actually in your project team. Its not as much the journey as the destination they get their kicks from. Project managers tend to have a mix of both flavors, but of course this is a generalization.

Knowing what tendency people have towards either process or content provides you with some great leads on how to motivate them. For example, a strong preference for content makes it important to know the goals of the project. What will be the end result, and why? Simply letting project team members in on these questions has an amazing effect on their motivation.

2. Reference Group

Another aspect to consider is the group of people the stakeholders measure themselves against, or their reference group. Software engineers tend to compare themselves with other software engineers, not only within their own company but also in a wider range, even internationally. Management members mostly compare themselves with other people within their companies hierarchies. Stakeholders use the reference group to formulate their own interests: I want to earn as much as Big Shot Shirley. I want to be as good as Leisure Suit Lenny. I want to have more power than Head Honcho Harry. If you know with whom stakeholders compare themselves, you have an important piece of information to build incentives or at least to know what drives the stakeholders.

3. Change versus Status Quo

Projects are always about change, and the real project die hards embrace ever-changing environments. If you operate in larger companies, however, you will most likely have members on your project team that are not change lovers” people who feel more secure with the things they know, with things just as they are now.

4. Defined versus Creative

How many times did you think that you had everything covered by putting a perfect procedure into place, only to find out that you were the only one sticking to the procedure? Putting a structure into place may be a good thing for one person but a real motivation-killer for another. This rigid structure is ruining my creativity! You must have heard that one before. You should steer with the right amount of defined processes. Stuffing a large binder with procedures, committees, and formats to follow is definitely a sure way to make some good people very unhappy. And then there are the guys and gals that love a fixed plan. Most of the time, they are also the ones who dislike change.

5. Group versus Individual

Consider the lone wolf that hacks away at programming code in the dead of night. Put him in a nine-to-five regimen in an exposed office environment and watch his productivity plummet. The other way around, put me all by myself without any social contacts, and you can see me dying a slow and lonely death. If people love to operate alone, dont force them to be social just for the sake of team spirit. Preference for working in a group or working as an individual is an important factor that a project manager can use to motivate the project people.