The Assessment: Phil Jones’ Dilemma范文

The Assessment: Phil Jones’ Dilemma

Phil Jones is a project leader at Engineering Co and leader of a team operating in six different geographical locations across two time zones. Phil is a mechanical engineer and his technical skills have been recognised by Engineering Co and he has made steady progress with the***pany since leaving university.

Phil has been the Senior Project Team Leader for six months on a blue chip project, an integrated rail and metro system in the Gulf region of the Middle East. The project went out to global tender and Engineering Co won the contract for supplying rails, switching gear, electrical supply and the metro stations and it secured the contract largely on its ability to deliver high quality projects on time, on budget and fit for purpose. Engineering Co did not submit the lowest tender for the project but the client was convinced of its technical and managerial capabilities which have given it a clear***petitive advantage. The***pany enjoys a strong industry reputation and for engineering and management graduates, it is an ‘employer of choice’ as it is widely regarded as having one of the best graduate development programmes in Britain. Engineering Co is essentially a project-based organisation but its structure is nominally a***bination of functional and divisional units. There is a clear division between planning and execution in Engineering Co and while strategy is ‘owned’ by the senior management team, the majority of the work is delivered through project teams.

Phil Jones is only thirty years of age but he is seen as having senior management potential and has been given leadership of one of the key project teams. Phil is based in Surrey, close to London, and he travels frequently throughout the UK to meet project team members and he is on-site in the Gulf every six-to-eight weeks but crucially, he is the only one in the team who has met the other members face-to-face. The project is still at the planning stage of the work and it has gone reasonably well up to now but Phil believes that performing ‘reasonably well’ means it is operating sub-optimally and that is not good enough; Phil wants it to be an exceptional team and he is determined to drive it towards that objective. The project team members were all internal applicants and Phil was given the final say on who would be recruited to the team. There was a significant number of internal applicants and the selection process was exhaustive, with each member being selected across a range of***petencies. Phil was certain that he had the right people with the rights skills in the right jobs at the right time but six months into the project, he senses undercurrents of tension amongst team members. In several instances team members have agreed with each other and it seems to Phil that they are doing this to avoid any overt conflict. Phil is not going out of his way to generate conflict but he believes that a certain level of it would be good for the team as it might bring some of the undercurrents into the open where they could be acknowledged and addressed and which might allow the team to develop into a more effective and efficient unit.

Phil is angry at the way it is going for he feels he is losing focus on the project as his time is increasingly being taken up with ‘people issues’, an area where he is the first to admit his strengths do not lie. Some of the issues Phil has had to deal with include team members stating that they are still not 100% sure of their role in the team and consequently work has been duplicated and that has cost the project time and money. Phil was pretty sure everything would somehow have fallen into place as at first people appeared to be***mitted to the project and the team. He thought he had made the immediate project goals clear and he assumed everyone knew what it was they had to as he thought he had given the team clear boundaries. Phil has also found that there are cultural issues around authority and responsibility and when it***es to decision-making, several team members look to him to make the calls. This irritates Phil as he has told people repeatedly that they are empowered to make decisions and they must stop referring every problem back up the line, but several team members countered that they are unsure of what they can make decisions on and that Phil is inconsistent, telling people to be pro-active and then overruling them later.

Phil is a problem-solver and he decided that the best course of action was to get some books on teams and groups to gain insights into what teams are, how they function and to gain a better understanding of some of the dysfunctional aspects of teams. Initially, Phil approached these issues as an engineer; the team is a system and if the problems are analysed dispassionately the analysis will generate solutions which should be accepted by everyone as they are the ou***e of a rational decision-making process. Phil takes***fort in certainty and he wishes at times that people would just act rationally and accept his decisions as they are based on what is best for the project. Grudgingly, Phil has***e to the view that he is a mini HR Manager first and a Project Team - Leader second and the project team is in danger of losing focus and momentum. Phil read Bruce Tuckman’s stages of group development with interest and he is now convinced that the team is stuck at the storming stage and he is unsure of what has to be done to get it to the performing stage. He is desperate for the team to succeed, not only for his own career. Phil wants all of the team members to be able to look back on their time on the project team as a positive experience and he wants people to be proud to have on their CV that they were part of the Gulf Metro Project Team.

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