Monitoring Resource Use and Availability
Most project managers lead people who do not work for them. The testers belong to a test manager, the engineers to an engineering manager, two of the analysts are contractors, and one of those is billed by the hour to somebody else's cost centre. Nobody in that arrangement has to do what the project manager says. Command and control is not being withheld here on principle; it was never on the table.
So the practical question behind leading a project team is what produces performance when instruction is not available. Most of the answer turns out to be preparation: making it possible for people to act correctly without asking, and noticing quickly when they cannot. The instruction-heavy version of leadership is largely what a manager falls back on once that preparation has been skipped.
What is actually in your gift
A project manager with no line authority still controls a good deal, and the list is worth knowing, because these are the things being granted, traded and withheld all day whether or not anybody is doing it deliberately.
Information. You see the whole shape of the work and almost nobody else does. Who understands why their piece matters, who hears about a change while it can still be absorbed, who finds out on the day: all of that is yours, and it is the single largest determinant of whether people make sensible decisions in your absence.
Sequence. You decide what happens in what order, which means you decide whose fortnight is manageable and whose is compressed into three days. A test lead whose window has been protected twice will answer the phone the third time.
Access. Decision-makers have limited attention and you allocate a slice of it. Whose question gets to the sponsor this week, whose problem is on the agenda, whose work gets seen by the people who fund it: these are real currency to somebody whose team is invisible from the top floor.
Obstacles. A great deal of what stops specialists is procedural and boring: the licence, the environment, the second approval, the data extract nobody will release. Removing those is unglamorous, it takes a project manager about twenty minutes and the specialist about three weeks, and it buys more goodwill than any amount of encouragement.
Credit. Who is named when something works, and in front of whom. A line manager writing an appraisal has to get the material from somewhere, and for anybody seconded to a project for six months, that somewhere is you.
Direction that survives your absence
The PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition gives leading the team its own place at Section 2.6.2, among the resources work, which places it next to the questions of capacity and conflict that decide what a team can actually do. In practice the leading happens well before anybody needs leading, and three things have to be explicit for that. They are usually explicit only inside the project manager's head.
What finished means for this piece of work. Not the objective, which everybody can recite, but the condition that has to be true before somebody puts it down and moves on. A borrowed specialist will apply their own profession's standard in the absence of yours, which is often higher than you need and occasionally much lower.
Which decisions belong to them. This is the one most often left vague, on the assumption that a competent person will use their judgement. Where people are not sure what they may decide, work does not go wrong; it stops, quietly, in front of them, and from the outside it looks like slow progress, which is the hardest failure there is to spot.
When to stop and come back. A named condition with a number in it wherever possible: this variance, that error rate, a supplier saying no to a specific request. A boundary written as good judgement produces either interruptions about nothing or silence about something serious, and which of the two you get depends mostly on the personality of the person you borrowed.
Performance you cannot appraise
Line managers see performance through a process with forms in it and a date in the calendar. A project manager sees it through the work itself, continuously, with no process at all, and the two views frequently disagree. Two signals carry most of it.
The first is whether things finish. Started work tells you very little, because almost everything is eighty per cent done by Wednesday. Finished work, meeting a condition somebody else agreed to, is the only reliable evidence available to you, and it is why the first of the three explicit things above matters so much.
The second is what happens to questions. A person whose questions stop arriving has either understood everything or given up asking, and the two look identical on a status report. The way to tell them apart is to ask a specific one back, about a detail only somebody actively in the work would know.
When performance genuinely is poor, the conversation works better held about the work and the effect rather than about the person, and held early enough that it is a small matter. Describe what happened and what it cost, ask what is in the way, and listen for the answer being an obstacle you can remove, which it is more often than not. Involving the line manager is legitimate and it is a step with a cost, because it changes the relationship permanently, so it belongs after the direct conversation and not in place of one.
A weekend cutover and four line managers
A financial services firm moved its core records to a new data centre over a single weekend. Eleven people worked the cutover: three from the project, and eight lent by storage, networks, database services, security and a supplier. The project manager had authority over none of the eight, and had met two of them twice.
The runbook ran to two hundred and fourteen steps and had been rehearsed once. The rehearsal fell over at step ninety-one, at twenty to three in the morning, when a record count came back short by a fraction of a per cent on one table. It was almost certainly benign. Nobody in the room knew whether they were allowed to continue, so eleven people waited forty minutes for a decision while the database lead tried to reach someone at home.
Between the rehearsal and the live run, the project manager went through the runbook and wrote a name and a threshold against every step where somebody might reasonably pause. About thirty of them. A mismatch below a stated figure on named tables: the database lead continues and logs it. Above that figure, or on the two tables holding balances: wake the head of operations, whose mobile number went on the front page. Nothing in the document was new authority. It was existing authority written down in advance, agreed with four line managers in about an hour of phone calls on the Thursday.
On the night, the same mismatch appeared at the same step. The database lead looked at the line against step ninety-one, made the call, logged it and carried on. Elapsed time, under three minutes. The cutover finished two hours inside its window, and the handwritten thresholds went into the runbook template for the four migrations that followed.
For a PMP® candidate, what matters is that leadership here is a set of things arranged beforehand, so a scenario in which a team has stalled is worth examining for the direction that was never given. A response that supplies the missing decision is solving today's problem, while the one that names who decides next time is doing the leading. Structured PMP exam preparation works on exactly this position, where the work belongs to you and the people belong to somebody else.
There is a quick test for this. Take a piece of work you have handed to somebody who does not report to you, and ask yourself whether they could say, without checking, what finished looks like, which decisions are theirs and what would make them ring you. If the answer is no to any of the three, the gap is in your preparation, and it is a great deal cheaper to close it this afternoon than at twenty to three on a Sunday morning.
Interested in going further?
Leading a borrowed team is mostly the work done before anybody needs an instruction, and it is learned in situations, not definitions. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation is built around decisions taken without the authority to impose them.
The PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition sets the leadership of a project team alongside the rest of the resources work, which is where its connection to capacity and conflict becomes clear.
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References
A142: The PMBOK 8 Resources Performance Domain: What It Really Covers
A143: People Are Resources, But Not Just Resources
A144: Resource Planning in a World of Shared Teams
A145: Resource Levelling vs Resource Smoothing
A146: Team Agreements: Small Document, Large Effect
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
