Speaker 1: In order to decide who does what on a project, we have to consider and outline our needs. Choosing the right people for a team is a big task, and one every project manager should take seriously. After all, these are the people who do the work on the project, so we want to make sure we have the right people lined up. When identifying people resources, we need to carefully consider the project needs and use that info to guide our decision making. First, a project manager will make a list of roles that they'll need on their team to complete each task. In the same way that a project manager is accountable for the overall initiation, planning, execution, and completion of a project, the person in each role is accountable for specific tasks within the project lifecycle. For example, a home construction project team might include roles on their list like an architect, a site manager, and multiple construction workers. Once the tasks are clearly laid out, the project manager decides how many people they'll need on their team. This can vary greatly depending on the project's size. For small projects, a team may only need three or four people to complete the deliverables on time. And for larger projects, a team might include dozens. At Google, we sometimes have hundreds of Googlers working on the same project. Getting the team size right is important for a bunch of reasons. For example, when there's a lot of people on a project, communication sometimes becomes difficult. That makes it more likely for someone to miss important details. But if your team is too small, there might not be enough people to finish all the tasks. Once you know how many people you need on your team, you have to think about who does what. To decide on the right person for each role, a project manager needs to think carefully about skills. Makes sense, right? If you're managing the construction of a house, you want to know that the construction workers who are building the frame or installing the drywall have the skills needed to do it properly. It's on the project manager to ensure that everyone on the team has the right skills to do the job. But it's also important to remember that skills can be taught. If someone doesn't have a certain skill initially, they might still be a great fit for the team. Maybe this person brings a positive attitude and attention to detail. There are many good reasons to have them on your team. Just keep in mind that if a teammate doesn't have the necessary skills, it's important that they are trained in time so not to cause project delays. When choosing teammates, a project manager also has to factor in each person's availability and whether they'll feel motivated to complete their assigned tasks. For example, you might know a fantastic site manager who'd make a great asset to the team. But if they're already staffed on another big project, they might not have the time to commit to yours. Or even if they do have the time, they might not feel like this project will give them the visibility they need for a promotion. Motivation is a key ingredient to great work. So it's a good idea to pick people who are excited to get involved. But of course, we don't always get to choose our resources. Sometimes another manager or team lead might just assign people to roles. When this happens, it's the project manager's challenge to deliver the best work with what we're given. Let's check in on our project at Office Green, where we're rolling out a new service. As a project manager, it's up to you to decide who you need on your team. You have to ask yourself questions on things like staff experience, availability, the workspace, team member workload on other projects, and more. For example, who on the team has office landscaping experience? Who's local to the city where the launch will happen? Who can be fully dedicated to this project for the next eight weeks? There's no exact formula for putting together the right team, which makes it a little tricky. Every situation is different and calls for a different set of skills, experience, and perspectives. It can be helpful to look deeper into each task on the project. Always ask yourself these key questions. How many people do I need on my team each step of the way? Which team members do I need and when? Are those experts already busy on other projects? Who makes the final decisions on project resources? To feel confident in your team, you need to know each person's role from the start. Clearly laying out the responsibilities for each role helps everyone know what project tasks they're accountable for. Odds are you can't complete this project on your own, even if you're the best project manager of all time, which we know you will be. Before we jump into the specific roles on a project, we want to call out that some roles aren't fixed. Sometimes team members need to adapt and take on more than one role at a time. This usually happens if the company is small or resources are limited. For example, at a small firm, you might be the project manager, designer, and marketer. Whether they're fixed or not, we always have these project roles. Project sponsors, team members, customers or users, stakeholders, and of course the project manager. Let's learn more about each of them. A project sponsor is a person who's accountable for the project and who ensures the project delivers the agreed upon value to the business. They play a vital leadership role throughout the process. Sometimes they fund the project. The sponsor will probably communicate directly with managers and key stakeholders. Team members are the heart of the operation. They're the people doing the day-to-day work and making the project happen. The customers are the people who will get some sort of value from a successfully landed project. Since the project aims to deliver something useful to the customers, the customer's needs usually define the project's requirements. You can think of them as the buyers of the project. In some situations, we have both customers and users for a project, and we need to differentiate between the two. Simply put, users are the people that ultimately use the product that your project will produce. To make the distinction nice and clear for you, think of it this way. A software company has created a type of software that allows teams to communicate with each other in an instant message application. The software is purchased by Corporation ABC. They are the customer, but the users are everyone within Corporation ABC that will be using the instant message application every day. Primary stakeholders are anyone involved in the project, those who have a vested interest in the project's success. Primary stakeholders are people who expect to benefit directly from the project's completion, while secondary stakeholders play an intermediary role and are indirectly impacted by the project. Secondary stakeholders may be contractors or members of a partner organization. The both primary and secondary stakeholders help project managers define project goals and outcomes. And finally, we can't forget the project manager, the person who plans, organizes, and oversees the whole project. That's you. Let's now plug these roles into our OfficeScreen project. Recall that OfficeScreen is a commercial plant company that does interior landscaping and plant design for offices and other commercial businesses. We're launching our new plant service, so if you recall, our SMART goal, which must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound, is to roll out a new service to provide office plants to top clients by the end of the year. There's a lot to do when launching a new service. Plants need to be ordered and delivered every few days. New clients will need to be familiarized with OfficeScreen and its procedures. And there will be ongoing updates to the website and app. For OfficeScreen's launch, our project sponsor is the director of product. They approve the project's budget and ensure that everything stays aligned to the vision, which in this case is that inexpensive and easy-to-maintain live plants are provided in order to improve the employee work environments. The team's made up of people from across departments, and they're all working together to support the project. For example, the marketing department has assigned some people to the team because they'll need to tell customers about this new service. On this project, the landscape designer is also the website designer. This is an example of where a team member plays more than one role. And you? You're the project manager. You're the one managing the information, people, and schedule to carry this project to a successful landing. Our customers for this project are buyers at offices who might be interested in OfficeScreen services such as office managers or procurement teams. However, the users are the employees who work at the offices because they're the ones who enjoy the plants. And finally, all of these people are project stakeholders. Secondary stakeholders won't play active roles throughout all phases of the project, but still need to be informed as they are a component of what the project needs to succeed. For example, these include OfficeScreen's investors who are helping to fund the new service launch, and the OfficeScreen receptionists who will answer a lot of customer questions about the new service once it's launched. Primary stakeholders are people who will benefit directly from the project's success, while secondary stakeholders are indirectly impacted by the project's success. Having all these different people involved on a project can get confusing, and that's where stakeholder analysis comes in handy. This is a visual representation of all the stakeholders. It helps you avoid surprises, build necessary partnerships, and ensure you're involving the right people at the right time. When done well, your stakeholder analysis helps you see all the opportunities for success and the potential risks. It illustrates which stakeholders are taking on which responsibilities. And it can help you include the right people in important conversations, which is key to getting the support you need throughout the project. There are three key steps to kicking off a stakeholder analysis. First, make a list of all the stakeholders that the project impacts. Then, determine the level of interest and influence for each stakeholder. And finally, assess their ability to participate and find ways to involve them. In the second step, we talk about influence and interest. What do those terms mean here? Influence measures how much power a stakeholder has and how much the stakeholder's actions affect the project outcome. In our office screen example, the director of product who first initiated the project and oversees new products and services has a huge amount of influence, while the vendor providing the greenery has less influence. Interest is pretty much what it sounds like. How much are the needs of the stakeholder affected by project operations and outcomes? For example, Office Screen's Human Resources department might not have as much interest in the product launch as the sales department does. The power grid is a super useful 2x2 grid used for conducting a stakeholder analysis. We use the power grid to assign each stakeholder's level of importance to the project, measuring their interest and influence. The position of the stakeholder on the grid usually determines their active role in the project. The higher the interest and influence, the more important the stakeholder is to the project's success. Without their support, it's unlikely that the project will successfully land. These people are our key stakeholders. Now that you have a better idea of each stakeholder's position on the team, you can plan how to best manage everyone. There are four different techniques you can use for managing stakeholders. The first group of stakeholders are the key players or key stakeholders. You find these people in the top right corner of the grid. To best manage key stakeholders, you want to closely partner with them to reach the desired outcomes. Of course, not everyone is a key stakeholder, but each role, even the non-key stakeholder, gets a spot on the grid. You find stakeholders with higher influence but lower interest in the top left corner of the grid. To manage these stakeholders, you want to consult with them and meet their needs. Their opinions and input are important to the project. The director of product has high influence but may not be vested into day-to-day activities and therefore will have a lower interest. Stakeholders with lower influence but high interest are in the right bottom corner of the grid. To manage these stakeholders, you want to show consideration for them by keeping them up-to-date on the project. It's unlikely they'll need a say in what's going on, but keeping them informed is important. For example, the customer success team may have lower influence but high interest since they'll work directly with clients on the new product. Last up, we have stakeholders with low influence and low interest. You'll find these in the bottom left corner. They're the least important of the stakeholders, but this doesn't mean that they don't matter. It might just be that for this particular project, they aren't as integral. So for this project, you mainly want to monitor them, keeping them in the know. Creating a grid like this is an effective way to track who should be communicated with and when. This grid here is an example of how that might play out depending on the project and the stakeholders. You may also want to create a steering committee made up of high influence and high interest stakeholders. These people will be the most senior decision-making body on any project. They have the authority to make changes to budget and approve updates to timeline or scope. The project manager isn't a member of the committee, but they're responsible for bringing the right project information to the steering committee so that decisions can be quickly made. How you engage your stakeholders from this point on depends on your particular situation. There are different ways to involve each stakeholder, and you have to be strategic to get helpful and relevant input from the right people at the right time. You want to meet with some stakeholders every single day, and others you'll just send periodic updates to. Stakeholder buy-in is the process of involving these people in decision-making to hopefully reach a broader consensus on the organization's future. To get stakeholders to buy-in on the project, you'll have to pay particular attention to your high-impact stakeholders and make sure they feel looped in. You want to explain to them how the project will help them achieve their goals, and you'll want to have their support later on if any issues come up. Here are some important things to keep in mind when communicating with stakeholders. If you have one main stakeholder, that stakeholder is likely to be highly influential and needs constant communication. But if you are on a larger project with numerous stakeholders, they won't be quite as involved in the day-to-day tasks. For stakeholders who need time to make decisions about the project, over-communicate early on. For example, hold frequent meetings and send daily end-of-day progress emails. This way, they have enough time to weigh the options and make decisions. Think about the level of project details each stakeholder needs. You don't want to spend time diving deep with stakeholders that just need a project summary. For example, the facilities team that delivers the product doesn't need daily updates on vendor pricing or website issues. On the flip side, do spend time updating key members that need frequent updates. The sales team will need to know pricing and availability changes, so a weekly check-in might make sense here. In the last video, we saw how a stakeholder analysis shows us how to best work with stakeholders and when to communicate with all the different people involved in the project. In this video, we're going to check out another handy tool called a RACI chart. A RACI chart helps to define roles and responsibilities for individuals or teams to ensure work gets done efficiently. It creates clear roles and gives direction for each team member. There are four types of participation included in a RACI chart. These are responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed. Let's take a look at each. Responsible refers to those doing the work to complete the task. Accountable refers to those making sure the work gets done. Consulted includes those giving feedback like subject matter experts or decision makers. And lastly, we have informed, which includes those just needing to know the final decisions or that a task is complete. Here's an image of how this breaks down in a chart form. When creating your RACI chart, you'll need to write down each task or deliverable for your project and then assign it the appropriate role for each stakeholder. To do this, first think about who's involved in the project. Write the roles or people's name in a row across the top of your chart. Pro tip, use roles rather than names if some people might take on more than one role. Next, write down the tasks or deliverables in a column on the left. Try not to get too specific here. You want the chart to be simple and easy to read. After that, go through each task and deliverable and ask who's responsible for doing this. Who's accountable if it doesn't get done? Who will have strong opinions to add and therefore should be consulted about how this gets done? And who needs to be informed of the progress or decisions made about this? Assign the letters R, A, C, and I based on your answers. For example, as a project manager on Office Screen's new service launch, one of your tasks is to create different price points for different packages and delivery frequencies. The head of finance will be accountable because the project needs to stay in budget and make money, but it's the financial analyst who's responsible as they're the person doing the work in determining optimal pricing. The director of product will be consulted on the matter as they oversee the product offerings. And finally, team members, like those on the sales team, need to be informed of the final pricing. It's possible there are several roles that fall into the informed and consulted categories. One thing that will always remain constant is there will never be more than one person designated as accountable. This prevents confusion because having one person accountable clearly defines ownership. However, the same person that is accountable may also be responsible. There are several other factors that can cause role confusion. For example, there might be unbalanced workloads, which means some people might be doing more work or less work than others on the team. Or there could be an unclear hierarchy when people aren't sure who to seek help from if a task doesn't get done. Or unclear ownership of decisions where people aren't sure who makes the final call on a project. Another issue could be overlapping work. This is when teams or individuals feel that they're responsible for the same work. When this happens, things can get confusing fast, and the same goes for excessive communication. While communication is usually a good thing, too much communication can actually make things more complicated. It can cause information overload where people don't know what to pay attention to, and so they miss something important. Wow, there's a lot of things that might cause confusion, but all these issues can be resolved or even prevented with a RACI analysis. Be proactive and do this work up front, and you'll help ensure the success of your project.

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