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Human Resources in Project Management-a Critical Analysis of existing

literature and evolving factors

Article  in  Management · October 2019

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Human Resources in Project Management- a Critical Analysis of existing literature and evolving
factors

Dr. Amer Abuhantash

Dr. UDAY DOKRAS,
Prof. Jeffrey Lewin

Ph.D. University of North Texas, USA.

*******

Project management, in particular, is like being on a large boat with no sail and no motor. The milling, disinterested
crew members have each been given a tiny oar. To them you are just the jerk who is trying to make them row with
that ridiculous little stick. Would you say there might be "human aspects" to getting that boat across the ocean?

_____________________________________________

ABSTRACT

Project management Human resource activities are still searching for the loadstone. Their
current practices, challenges they face and the environment in which they operate is
largely unexplored. Some of the research issues that have already been addressed are
catalogued here with the hope of charting a path for a closer look.

________________________________________

KEY TERMS
Human Resource Management, HRM, Project Human Resource Management

To be successful Companies need to employ and train qualitative staff, provide human
resources and develop the organizational structure all as a part of Human Resource
Management (HRM). There is a distinction between HRM in normal (functional) organizations
and in organizations with projects. Normal or traditional human resource management directs
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its attention to a stable regime in a traditional scenario such as a manufacturing facility
producing the same type of goods day in and day out. The purpose of project management, is
to bring about structure in the execution of a project. A project is used to create a unique
service, product or result . Project management is playing an important role in changing
business landscapes and commands its own objectives, measurable criteria and a defined cost
and time. Due to the limited timeframe for a project, the scope and resources available are also
limited. The time required to complete a project also becomes important. The more time the
project takes to complete, the more complex it becomes, raising the risk of failure.

Today one can say that Project management has a vital function to play in the business
scenario. Because HRM is addressing issues on sites as opposed to traditional office spaces, the
location can be more dynamic than static. But in Project-oriented organizations though HR may
be at the core of the management, it could be in a state of flux. Here impromptu HR models
need to be created and applied to solve problems; temporary work processes are adopted in
their delivery of either products or services or both. Today, Project management has
developed i n t o a s u b j e c t discipline alongside other management functions such as
operations, information technology, or finance and the research literature in this discipline is growing.
Project Management is also being used as a tool by organizations to increase their productivity. There
has been a s i g n i f i c a n t i n c r e a s e f r o m 2 0 0 2 t o 2 0 1 1 i n t h e a p p l i c a t i o n o f
project management methodology and tools within the project
m a n a g e m e n t p r o f e s s i o n a l s . However, there is still limited research evidence that links PM
performance with the value resulting from investment in PM. 1A

2
Project Human Resource Management1:

Includes the processes that organize, manage, and lead the project team which is comprised of
the people with assigned roles and responsibilities for completing the project. Project team
members may be assigned full or part-time jobs, and may be added or removed from the team
as the project progresses depending on when and where their skill sets are required. Participation
of team members during planning adds their expertise to the process and strengthens their
commitment to the project and are also referred to as the project's staff. Although specific roles
and responsibilities for the project team members are assigned, the involvement of all team
members in project planning and decision making is beneficial.
HRM of projects involves the following steps:
I. Plan Human Resource Management—The process of identifying and documenting
project roles, responsibilities, required skills, reporting relationships, and creating a
staffing management plan.
II. Acquire Project Team—The process of confirming human resource availability and
obtaining the team necessary to complete project activities.
III. Develop Project Team—The process of improving competencies, team member
interaction, and overall team environment to enhance project performance.
IV. Manage Project Team—The process of tracking team member performance, providing
feedback, resolving issues, and managing changes to optimize project performance.

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Importance of Including Key Personnel in a Project
Good project management is important for the success of a project and HR is an integral part of
this- in fact the most important part, because “men move material” and not vice-versa. Project
success also consists of dealing with funding, policy interpretations or variance of interest and
viewpoints among stakeholders. Identifying and deploying key personnel, getting know-how
internally or externally from Consultants and aligning all resources is vital.
2
These resources could be:

1. People
2. Money
3. Equipment
4. Facilities
5. Materials and supplies
6. Information
7. Technology.

The key is to start with the people first, other materials and facilities are useless without the right
project team. HRM of Projects has traditionally had two roles; a management support role,
providing the organization with competent people to undertake the work processes, and an
employee support role, involving employee well being.

Projects being temporary, entail greater uncertainty, and create a dynamic but feeble regime
with more discontinuity. Here HR processes need to have a different hue. These pressures can
create issues for employee well-being and ethical treatment, which need to be managed. The
role of the HR department needs to be different from the classically-managed (functional)
organization. This gives rise to a dynamic work environment, where additional pressures can be
imposed on the employee from fluctuating work-loads, uncertain requirements, and multiple

role demands.3

First are key stakeholders. These are those whose support is essential for the success of the
project. Were this support to be withdrawn, the project could fail. These include the Project
Director who makes major decisions and who reports on the project progress directly to the

4
owners of the organization. This is followed by project manager and his or her support team, who
have the highest involvement.

Who to Include On a Project:

Generally, a project will involve “significant contributors” who play a significant role in the
development and execution of the project, some key personnel who are also significant
contributors but with a bigger role, consultants and other external bodies or people involved
indirectly in the project. Key personnel are the individuals who contribute to the execution or
the scientific development of the project. Their contribution should also be measurable in a
substantive way. Generally, the program director (in a company that sells services) or a product
manager (in a company selling goods) is considered key personnel in the project. Further, no
project can succeed without the inclusion of many other key personnel, in their equivalent
forms depending on the scope, scale and type of project.

If HRM is a core process in the project-oriented organization then it calls for greater involvement
of the HR manager who needs to be more insidious. Traditional HR processes need to be more
insidious too and foster different and additional HR policies, standards, rules, and guidelines and
a greater partnership with the project management professionals.

As mentioned earlier, projects are not bound by office space; they are the creators of future
office space. In projects, the complex interplay of the roles of the HRM department, line
management and project management creates challenges and pitfalls where people are
managed across the boundaries of the permanent and temporary organization. Exploring the
HRM responsibilities of line managers, project managers and the HRM department in four
project-oriented companies in the Netherlands, Austria, the UK and the USA the researchers
ascertained that the HRM Department has a potentially powerful role in both monitoring and
guiding the different players from the line and the project organizations, and in protecting the
well-being of employees whose work traverses these organizational boundaries. Second, by

5
offering project orientation the interplay between the three main parties delivering HRM

practices can be better managed. 4

Ian Clark and Trevor Colling wrote a research paper in 2005 that illustrated the lack of
engagement between project management literatures and personnel/HR literatures on the
role of HR practitioners in project‐led organizations It emphasized a lack of engagement
between project management literatures and HR/personnel literatures in spite of t he fact
that “project management” systems are a core managerial mechanism for the deployment
of staff. The paper examines specific human resource practices, for example, staff appraisal
and efforts at work re‐structuring. The paper finds that in project‐led organizations, such as
those in engineering contracting, embedded sectoral characteristics such as portfolio
training limit the capacity of HR practitioners to actively change employee perceptions of
their development.5

Anne Keegan , Martina Huemann and J. Rodney Turner report on a longitudinal multi method
case study of a company from the telecommunication industry. The company has developed into
a project-oriented company during the last 12 years (1997–2009). In this paper the development
is analyzed and structured into phases. The limits of planning and managing change processes in
practice are reflected. The development of the case study company towards project-orientation
was rather ad hoc than planned and structured. The findings indicate that in a project-oriented
company Human Resource Management also needs to change from an administration function
to become a proactive business partner supporting project-oriented management.

“Human Resource Management (HRM) is of key and strategic importance to the project-oriented
organization. Every time a new project or program is started, the human resource (HR) configuration of
the organization changes. Within this dynamic environment, different and additional practices are
required from the traditionally managed organization. However, in spite of this, the needs of HRM in the
project-oriented organization have not received great attention in either the HRM or project management
literature.” 6

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There is also, in the management landscape, an assumption with the parent companies that
their culture, values, dynamic and temporary project organizations are clones of the original
parent. Considering the fact that projects are driven by employee teams that emanate not only
from inside but also outside the parent company, this assumption that parent culture is
reflected in the project organization is erroneous. When parent company HRM department
relies on this assumption, then adopting HR practices to the project environment becomes an
arduous task that is often faced with either failure or considerable tweaking to the original HR
mandate says Professor Martina Dr. Martina Huemann of the · Department of Strategic
Management and Innovation Wirtschaftsuniversität in Vienna. Dr. Huemann has a deep
interest in how and why change processes come into existence and how to design and enable
them. In her book she endeavors to bridge theory and practice, strategy and operations.7

This book analyses how the modern HR organization stacks up alongside the temporary
organization that is the project, to identify the HR constraints and needs of the project
organization and offer a model of project-oriented HRM.

There is, however, a dearth of research on the project aspect of HRM 8as opposed to the

traditional HRM as if in the process of chasing the traditional; research has passed by the
travails and tribulations of project HR. In today’s competitive business environment, Human
Resource Management (HRM) has cried out for a definition but this fate is belated and the
process of crystallizing a definition is still ongoing but worse is the fate of HRM in project
organizations.

Ian Clark, Trevor Colling wrote a research paper in 2005 that illustrated the lack of
engagement between project management literatures and personnel/HR literatures on the
role of HR practitioners in project‐led organizations It emphasized a lack of engagement
between project management literatures and HR/personnel literatures in spite of the fact
that “project management” systems are a core managerial mechanism for the deployme nt

of staff. 9 The paper examines specific human resource practices, for example, staff

7
appraisal and efforts at work re‐structuring. The paper finds that in project‐led
organizations, such as those in engineering contracting, embedded sectoral characteris tics
such as portfolio training limit the capacity of HR practitioners to actively change employee
perceptions of their development.

It was found in another study that by and large in project-oriented organizations the
management support role dominates, but there was a dearth of employee caring. It was also
suggested that the need for profit and responding to client demands often takes precedence over

employee well-being.10 Prabhakar, Guru Prakash 11 had established in a comprehensive study of

HR practices in 153 projects across 28 nations in that autocratic style of HR was not as successful
as a transformational style. Project manager’s experience, the ability to consciously
maneuver from one leadership approach to another to enhance and a transformational
Leadership all would contribute to project success. He found that today’s project manager is
increasingly using the transformational leadership approach common to general
management. This study is one of the first to model transformational and style
leadership across projects in various organizations and in several countries. And the
results suggest several interesting and important avenues for further research:

From the book see FN 11

8
Project management is playing an important role in changing business landscapes. The purpose
of project management is to help in the design and development of a project and bring about
structure in the execution of a project. Examined above are a few of the research topics on
effective project Human Resource (HR) current practices. As Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger
and Kenneth Cukier say, Information or data is used to extract new insights to find actionable
correlations. The end result is not casualty. They expand on this insight by writing: “we can
discover patterns and correlations in the data that offer us novel and invaluable insights. Big data
is about what, not why.”13 Human Resource challenges are also like big data, crying out for a
closer look.

********

REFERENCES

1. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) is PMI's

(Project Management Institute, 14 Campus Boulevard Newtown Square, PA 19073-3299
USA) flagship publication and is a fundamental resource for effective project
management in any industry. It has been updated to reflect the latest good practices in
project management.
2. http://lrrpublic.cli.det.nsw.edu.au/lrrSecure/Sites/Web/5767/lo/2248/2248_01.htm
3. Human resource management in the project-oriented organization: Employee well-
being and ethical treatment, Rodney Turner, Martina Huemann, AnneKeegan
,International Journal of Project Management, Volume 26, Issue 5, July 2008, Pages 577-
585

4. Huemann, M., Turner, J. R., & Keegan, A. E. (2004). The role of human resource
management in project-oriented organizations. Paper presented at PMI® Research

9
 Conference: Innovations, London, England. Newtown Square, PA: Project Management
Institute. Also a Book by the same name published in 2018 by PMI.

5. Ian Clark, Trevor Colling, (2005) "The management of human resources in project
management‐led organizations", Personnel Review, Vol. 34 Issue: 2, pp.178-
191, https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480510579411

6. Human Resource Management in the Project-Oriented Organization: Towards a Viable

System for Project Personnel, by Martina Huemann (Author)1st Edition, eBook
Published 3 March 2016

7 Ibid
8.Mostly Discussed Research areas in Human Resource Management (HRM) –A Literature
Review,Mansoor Hussain and Mushtaq Ahmad International Journal of Economics and
Management Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2012, pp. 10-17 See for instance - A Bumpy Road
Building the European Theme Park Industry, by John Robinett and Raymond Braun, The
Economics Research Associates (ERA),2007 where the project constraints of all theme park projects emerging
in Europe are examined from all viewpoints except the most important one-HRM.

9. Ibid F.N. 5

10. Competency-based selection and assignment of human resources to construction

projects, V.Shah hosseini and M.H.Sebt, Scientia Iranica,Volume 18, Issue 2, April 2011, Pages
163-180, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scient.2011.03.026.This paper used a fuzzy
adaptive decision making model for selection of different types of competent personnel. For
that purpose, HR is classified into four types of main personnel: Project Manager, Engineer,
Technician, and Laborer. Then the competency criteria model of each main personnel is
developed. Results from this system in personnel staffing show the high capability of the
model in making a high quality personnel selection.

11. A new mandate leadership in projects: an empirical study reflecting the importance of
transformational leadership on project success across twenty-eight nations. Prabhakar,
G.P., 2005. Project Management Journal36 (4), 53-60.

12. Do Project management competencies influence the project performance? An insight

at Philips Healthcare; Thesis Report MST-80433 (M.Sc. Thesis Management Studies, Nitin
Chandra, Wageningen University Netherlands.

13. Big Data: A revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, Viktor Mayer-
Schoenberger and Kenneth Cukier define big data as being able to extract new insights and
create new forms of value by analyzing largedata sets to find actionable correlations.
Understanding the pros and cons of big data analytics. Available from:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265394350_Understanding_the_pros_and_cons_of_big_data_analytics

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