Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Managing People: Managing People Working As Individuals and in Groups
Managing People: Managing People Working As Individuals and in Groups
Managing People: Managing People Working As Individuals and in Groups
Alice is a software project manager working in a comp any that develops alarm
systems. This comp any wishes to enter the growing ma rket of assistive technology to
help elderly and disabled people live independently. Alice has been asked to lead a
team of 6 d evelopers than can develop new products based around the companyÕs
alarm technology. Her first role is to select team members either from software
engineers already in the comp any or from outside.
To help select a team, Alice first assesses the skills that she will need: The se are:
1. Experience with existing alarm t echnology as it is reused
2. User interface design experience because the users are untrained and may be
disabled and hence need facilities such as variable font size s, etc.
3. Ideally, someone who has experience of designing assistive technology systems.
Otherwise, some one with experience of interfacing to hardware units as all
systems being developed involve some hardware control.
General purpose development skills.
Educational This may provide an indicator of the basic fundamentals that the
background candidate should know and of their ability to learn. This factor
becomes increasingly irrelevant as engineers gain experience
across a range of projects.
Communication This is imp ortant because of the need for project staff to
ability communicate orally and in writing with other engineers, ma nagers
and customers.
Adaptability Adaptability may be judged by looking at the different types of
experience that candidates have had. This is a n imp ortant attribute
as it indicates an ability to learn.
Attitude Project staff should have a p ositive attitude to their work and
should be willing to learn new skills. This is an important attribute
but often very difficult to assess.
Personality This is an important attribute but difficult to assess. Candidates
must be reasonably comp atible with other team members. No
particular type of personality is more or less suited to software
engineering.
Self-
realisa tio n needs
Esteem needs
Social needs
Safety n eeds
After deny ing that there is a problem, Dorothy admit s that she seems to
have lost interest in the job. She expec ted a job whe re she wou ld develop
and use he r ha rdware interfacing skill s. Howeve r, she is basicall y working
as a C prog rammer wit h other team members and she is conc erned that she
is not developing her interfacing skil ls. She is worried that she will find it
dif ficult to find a job after this project that involv es hard ware interfacing.
Becaus e she does no t want to ups et the team by reveali ng that she is
thinking abou t the n ext p roject, she has decided that it i s best to mi nimi se
conve rsation wit h them.
In creating a group for assistive technology developme nt, Alice is aware of the
imp ortance of selecting memb ers with comp lementary personalities. When
interviewing people, she tried to assess whether they were task oriented, self-
oriented and interaction oriented. She felt that she was primarily a self-oriented
type as she felt that this project was a way in which she would be noticed by senior
manageme nt and promoted. She therefore looked for 1 or perhaps 2 interaction-
oriented personalities with the remainder task oriented. The final assessment that
she arrived at was:
Alice Ğ self-oriented
Brian Ğ task-oriented
Bob Ğtask-oriented
Carol Ğ interaction-oriented
Dorothy Ğself-oriented
Ed Ğ interaction-oriented
Fred Ğ task-oriented