Previous Chapter: Part 3 - The Projects
As a manager, keeping track of projects is very important, but keeping track of the people working on the projects might even be more important than that. Where would projects be without the “human capital”? So keeping people happy and motivated is key for the success of projects. And believe it or not, but most people like their manager to talk to them, make them feel like he is there for them and can help them if needed.
Strangely, if you ask managers what motivates them in their jobs, the answers vary from “good atmosphere”, “good collaboration and communication with colleagues” to “interesting and challenging work”. Money comes in around the fourth or the fifth place. However, if you ask managers what they think motivates their staff “money” is the number one answer. Now why do they believe that their staff is motivated differently from themselves? By the way, I’m not making this up. This test has been done by a company that provides business courses in Holland. The moral of this story is that as a manager you can motivate your people by using the techniques that you would like from your manager. Money really isn’t everything.
Now besides motivating staff, as a manager you also like to keep track of who is working on what, until when, etc. You’ll need to have an overall resource planning too.
Where does SharePoint fit in this story?
So where does SharePoint fit in this entire people management story? Well, claiming SharePoint is the ultimate tool for people management would be a lie, but on the other hand is there a tool out there that is? People management has a lot to do with good communication and collaboration. Everybody can be taught to manage a budget, numbers don’t need to be guided, they never feel unmotivated, etc. Managing people however is something that you have or don’t have. It can be ameliorated by taking courses, but the basics have to be there. If you are terribly shy and introvert the chances of you becoming a successful manager are slim to none. And were does SharePoint shine? Communication and collaboration. So SharePoint can really help a manager with people management. Of course you’ll still need the personal contact, but if a person sees his manager working with the same tool as him and can communicate with his manager fast with tools he is used to, the threshold of actually communicating with his manager becomes a lot lower. And thus, communication improves just by having the same platform.
Besides the communication and collaboration improvements, when SharePoint is coupled with Exchange it has even more possibilities not only for communication, but also for resource planning. Calendars, tasks and email are the basic tools for resource planning and make them accessible everywhere on any device. Of course a real resource planning goes a lot further than this and especially for big departments SharePoint and Exchange might not be sufficient to cover all the resource planning bases. But on the other hand, it might still be a good idea to integrate those other tools into SharePoint or Exchange. This will ultimately help a lot with burying the image of a manager with his own tools far away from the workforce.
How do we achieve this?
Achieving all this in SharePoint will mean using a very well known SharePoint feature with a pretty bad reputation. Yes, I’m talking about MySites. In most companies that use SharePoint, MySites are either disabled or are seen as a playground on which the people can play around a bit. But actually, MySites can serve a very useful purpose when it comes to people management. Instead of using the MySites pages as a playground for people to test the most outrages color schemes, you can start using MySites as an internal CV engine. People can keep their own profile updated on the site and you as a manager can search for the correct resources just as easily as you would search for a document. But not only you as a manager has direct benefits from this. By keeping the MySite as your personal internal CV, other people having trouble with a tool or some piece of hardware can now search for the person that is best qualified to answer their question. Instead of having to call around to find a person to answer their question they can search the MySites, find the person and, if you have AD, Exchange or Unified Communication, immediately contact him via email, communicator or telephone. Although this works best in larger departments in which not everybody knows each other personally, this also works for small departments to keep your colleagues up to date on what you are doing. And as a manager I’m sure you like it better that your people keep in touch on your internal portal than via Facebook or Twitter.
Another added benefit is the integration of personal and general calendars in which a manager can book a person in for a certain project for a certain time. He already knows the person is the right person for the job through his MySite profile, but now he can also see his availability and book him in via calendars that can be integrated in Outlook. By simply dragging bookings from you general resource calendar to the personal ones, the people are automatically up-to-date on what they will be working on. Of course this means that if some conflicts arise, they can immediately point this out instead of the problem coming up when the day comes to start working on something new.
Of course with calendars, whether personal or central, comes the possibility of vacation planning. Through workflow on the vacation calendar(s), the manager can be issued a “request for approval” automatically when people add vacation time to it.
As you might notice there are huge possibilities when using SharePoint to keep everything in one system. And again, if you already have tools to do all this, take the time to investigate whether you can integrate these tools with SharePoint so that it becomes your department working portal. One tool, one team, one result.
Finally, it might also be a good idea of having a place on each MySite through which a person can communicate with his manager. This can be done by a document library (e.g. for communicating documents like performance appraisals etc.) or via a personal forum (e.g. for communicating a person’s wish for a new project or a change in careers, etc.). If they are used correctly with good security that makes this place accessible only to a person and his manager, this can be a good place for communicating private things that otherwise might not have surfaced until a performance review or another long-term appointment. The manager can be on the ball on people’s requests and the people themselves can ask questions or make suggestions in a private way without having to go to the manager’s office.
What do you get out of it?
Simply put, a community within your company. You get a team that can communicate more easily and by doing that gets to know each other better. As a manager, you can actively participate in this and be one of the community, with the added benefit that it is easier to find the right people for a particular project, communicate with people privately or publicly and plan them in with tools that they themselves use.
Finally a good community will help improve the atmosphere within the team, provide better communication between people and ensure that people can work in the projects best suited for them. Now let that be the three most motivating aspects of a person’s job and you know that SharePoint can help you and your team become more motivated. And if that happens, the results in projects will automatically follow.
By Ronny Gabriels, Functional Analyst and ex-.net Solution Architect
Next Chapter: Part 5 - The Reporting