Essay Homework 6

Submitted By heliovict8
Words: 1919
Pages: 8

Read "Do As I Do," Phillip Quigley, APICS – The Performance Advantage, Sep 200, p 58
Write a brief synopsis, highlighting the major points. The future of an organization depends on trust. Loyalty starts at the top and goes down, and when you take care of people, they will take care of you. Recently, management did not seem to think about people and the common words at an organization look to be downsizing, layoffs and so on. On the other hand, it is a fact that the only competitive advantage that companies have is their people. It is people who create, design, improve processes, innovate, etc. Although people all the job that machines do not do, they must be trained to get that performance. There are some behaviors that managers must have to establish a relationship of trust with employees:
1. Talk honestly to people: Since people believe the company is not telling the truth, it is difficult to regain credibility.
2. Listen to people: Managers must admit that people underneath can have important ideas, and they can be right.
3. Treat people with respect and dignity: This is fundamental to make people trust in you.
4. Grow people and let them accomplish: Giving the chance to people earn some sense of accomplishment is very important the make the company healthy.
5. Take care of people: People will take care of you.
6. Promote the right people to leadership spots: By promoting the right people, the company shows what is critical.
These actions are simple in theory but very hard to execute.

Read “Five Ways To Make Or Break Your Team”, by Chauncey Hollingsworth, PM Network, Apr 2009, p 53-57
Write a brief synopsis.
This article describes five situations that can make the team project work together or can harm team’s moral and compliance. The author also explains how to handle these issues for the good of the team, such as shorten and clearly defined meetings, explain any cause of changes during the project, manage clients to defend the team, they the truth about any mistakes that could be occurred during the planning phase, and move aside interpersonal obstacles within the team.
What are the five common issues, and how to avoid them?
1. Out of control meetings: When there are excessive and meaningless meetings. PM’s explain clearly of what the meeting is about, limit the number of people, and make concise status meetings, just with relevant information about the performance.
2. Seemingly random changes in project direction: When team members are committed to recent changes and willing to make sacrifices for it. However, management has decided to make another change. People can feel really bad in this situations. PM’s should listen and keep the lines of communication open as well as explain why they are changing and why it is important to the project completion.
3. Overly demanding stakeholders: When stakeholders requires difficult tasks in a short period. PM’s should not overextend their forces and speak the truth to the customer about the cost overrun and quality impacts due to sudden changes in scope.
4. Energy-zapping, soul-sucking unexpected delays: When some mistake has led to putting the project on delay that can sap people’s energy. PM’s should discover the problem as fast as possible and then be truthful about it. If there is a mistake in the planning process, the team must keep together and move forward.
5. Team squabbles gone awry: When people don’t understand each other and accept their differences they can cause a collateral damage within the team. PM’s must schedule a face-to-face meeting solve the problem for the sake of the project.

Read “In Praise of Small Teams”, by Bud Baker, PM Network, Mar 2009, p26-27
What is Parkinson’s Law?
Parkinson’s Law is a book wrote by a philosopher named C. Northcote Parkinson, who said, in short, that “Works expands to fill the time available to do it.”
List key points of the article.
In this article, we face an interesting situation: The increase in the number of people