The Project Team Is Not the Project Manager’s Staff
The phrase my team does a lot of quiet damage. It carries an assumption of staff and subordinates that almost never matches the arrangement: a group of specialists, usually employed elsewhere in the organisation, who know more about their part of the work than the project manager ever will, lent for a period to a piece of work somebody else is accountable for.
Section 2.5.3 of The Standard for Project Management describes the project team as the people who perform the work to create the outputs and outcomes, which is a plainer statement than it looks. The performing belongs to them. The project manager's accountability is for something else entirely, and knowing exactly where the line falls prevents most of the friction that develops in month three.
Where the line actually falls
The project manager owns the commitments. What the project has promised to deliver, by when, at what cost, to what standard, and whether it is on course for those things. That accountability is real and it does not require authority over individuals; it requires knowing the state of the work and being honest about it.
The team owns the method. How the work gets done, in what order internally, by which of them, to what professional standard within the constraints given. This is theirs because they know it and because ownership is what produces care. A project manager who reaches across that line gets compliance, which looks identical to commitment on a status report and behaves very differently when something unexpected happens.
Three practices that follow
Estimates come from the people who will do the work. Not endorsed by them after somebody else has produced a number, but produced by them, with the project manager's role being to ask what the estimate assumes and what would change it. An estimate imposed from outside is a target with an estimate's name on it, and everybody involved knows the difference, which is why it is met by working longer or by quietly reducing what done means.
Allocation happens inside the team where it can. A team deciding among itself who takes what will usually allocate better than a project manager with a spreadsheet, because they know who has capacity, who wants the stretch and who has the context from last month. The project manager's contribution is the constraint: this has to be finished by Thursday, this needs somebody who can sign it, these two things cannot be done by the same person.
Technical standards are defended outward. When somebody outside the project asks for a shortcut that the professionals in the team consider unsound, the project manager's job is to carry that objection outward with its reasoning intact. A project manager who negotiates the standard away on the team's behalf has spent something that was not theirs, and the team will notice quickly.
A validation approach that arrived fully formed
A pharmaceutical site was installing new analytical instruments across its quality laboratories, and the validation work sat with a small internal team of three, all of them experienced, all of them lent to the project part time.
The project manager, under schedule pressure and wanting to help, wrote the validation approach himself over a weekend. It was competent. It drew on what he had seen on a previous project at another site, it was internally consistent, and it arrived on a Monday as a document for the team to follow.
The team followed it. That was the problem. Two of its assumptions did not hold on this site, one concerning the calibration route for a particular instrument type and one about what the quality unit would accept as evidence. Both were known to the team, and neither was raised, because the document had arrived as an instruction and a document that arrives as an instruction gets executed rather than examined.
The failure surfaced at the quality review, eleven weeks later, and cost about five weeks of rework on two instruments. The question worth asking afterwards was not why the team had not spoken up, but what in the situation had made speaking up an act of resistance.
What the project manager did next was the useful part. The revised approach was written by the team over three days, with him in the room asking questions: what does this assume, what happens if the quality unit disagrees, what would make you change it. It was better than his version, it took longer to produce, and it was challenged twice by the team themselves during the work because they were reading it as authors. The shadow board outside their lab, incidentally, has never matched its painted outlines, because the team rearranged it years ago into the order they actually work in, and nobody who works there finds that remarkable.
When the project manager does step in
Where a constraint is genuinely external. Safety, regulatory requirements, contractual commitments and the project's agreed scope are not the team's to trade, and saying so clearly is part of the role. The distinction is between telling a team what the boundary is and telling them how to work inside it.
Where the team cannot resolve a split. A professional disagreement that has stopped progress needs somebody to convene it and, if it remains unresolved, to escalate it with both positions intact. Deciding it personally is the last resort, and doing so requires saying out loud that this is what is happening and why.
For a PMP® candidate, the point to hold is that accountability for the project and authority over the work are different things, so a scenario where a project manager has specified how specialists should work is describing a line that has been crossed. A response that adds oversight to enforce the method compounds it. A structured PMP exam preparation course takes apart situations where the project manager is accountable and the expertise sits elsewhere.
Take the last three things that went to your team as instructions and ask which of them were constraints and which were methods. If the second pile has anything in it, the fastest available improvement is to hand one of those decisions back, with the constraint stated, and see what comes out.
Interested in going further?
Being accountable for work you have no authority to direct is the ordinary condition of project management, and it is learned in situations rather than in definitions. Omega's PMP® Exam Preparation works through that boundary and what sits on each side of it.
The project team and its role are described in The Standard, published with the PMBOK® Guide Eighth Edition.
Ad · Amazon affiliate link.
References
A007: The Standard for Project Management vs the PMBOK Guide
A146: Team Agreements: Small Document, Large Effect
A027: Project Manager, Sponsor, Product Owner and Team: Who Does What?
A042: Why Telling the Team What to Do Is Often the Wrong PMP Answer
A024: Facilitation as a Core Project Management Skill
PMP and PMBOK are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.
