My question to everyone who works in industry is, was there ever a case where a major team player was placed on another project and removed from your team? If yes, how did that change the project timeline or tasks. How do project managers deal with this sort of change if a director from a another department takes away one of your major team members?
In the industry, your company will usually have a defined list of top projects that need to be worked towards by the end of the year and a number of launches of projects expected. When these projects find an area that lags due to resourcing, the senior leadership team may reorganize the teams to have some of the engineers or designers allocate 50% of their time towards their initial project vs their new assignment (or even greater differences of work allocation between projects). Project managers need to remain conscious of the changes of their team's time and the human capital required to keep moving the project forward. They must adjust the schedules as necessary and know that their team also needs to stay motivated (aka keep a work/life balance so they are not overworking themselves, especially during times like this pandemic). The functional managers in each area also need to know their team's strengths and who would be more beneficial on teams focused in one area of the business so they can maximize the efforts towards finishing the project. Overall, a project manager as well as a functional manager need to remain flexible when human capital is moved towards projects so they can manage their teams as well as the expectations from their stakeholders.
This is a very typical situation that happens all the time in the industry. Often times there are some reworks to the organization whether in a department or in a project team. Some project team members are usually assigned a project to kick it off and get it to a certain point then hand it off to another member from their function in order to complete. That is usually because of the bandwidth that those people have, considering that they are involved in a lot of projects. The main focus of those individuals is to ramp up any new project based on their experience and hand it off to another member to handle the execution since it is very time consuming and requires a lot of follow ups. That is a strategy that is sometimes implemented in some teams. Other changes can happen because someone left that function and projects are just being rotated or reshuffled on the members in order to have equal workloads. When things like that happen, the directors or whoever decided on switching members allows for a transition period of time in order for the former member to educate the new member and bring them up to speed. Even after the transition happens, there would be further communication within the function to ensure that the understand is still the same and that the project is going as planned. The main role of the project manager is to make sure that everything is handed off to the new member in a timely manner, everything is being clear to what is needed and what has been already completed. The project manager has to also ensure that there is enough transition period before the full conversion of the new member. With this being said there shouldn't be any delays to the project.
When I was working in software development, we were a fairly small group within the company, so each individual member had projects they were working on that would affect other projects. This would very often lead to employees being shifted from one project to the next because of other projects needing to be completed and another project affecting it. Usually this would lead to a slight shuffle of an employee’s workload but in extreme cases where large scale changes had to be made to a different project, that employee’s work would be given to other employees that were available. I imagine something similar would occur in a larger scale operation although the shift of responsibilities would be more drastic.
In a past internship of mine, I was working in a small group of people to rollout training material for a new overarching company software. My team was very small and to complete all the training material, we each had our own topics of the software to create training material for. In this case, each person was specially trained on their assigned aspects of the new software. During that time, we had one member of our team leaving to join another department within the company. When this occurred, the rest of the team had to split up the focal points that the departing team member was specialized in and start training on that material as well. I remember many meetings with the team member who was leaving for them to teach me how to conduct certain tasks and help me learn their portion of the software. Although it was a lot of extra work for the entire team, the training material was all completed on time and there were not many issues with the team member leaving.
The occurrence of a team member being placed on another project was something I experienced while working as an intern for a medical device manufacturing company. Due to the pandemic, the company I was working for had switched many interns to different projects that would allow them to work remotely. As a result, an intern I worked alongside to perform verification testing on site was moved to a different project. Due to this, the work that individual was responsible for was split between me and another project engineer on the team. Luckily, we were both aware of the protocols required to perform the tasks at hand and did not have to allocate time for training. Furthermore, there was effective communication with that intern in the case that we did have any questions regarding the tasks at hand. Despite this, I did have to work longer hours for a few weeks to ensure that all tasks were being accomplished on schedule and prior to deadlines. Overall, this change did not result in any major delays to the project and was handled effectively.
On a similar note, I've had a team member from another division given to me. The greatest problem that I encountered is that the individual brought a level of toxicity to the team that had to be dealt with using HR resources.
The existing team had already bonded, had already learned out each other's communications and work styles and were making meaningful and valued contribution. Therefore, before too much damage could be done to team morale, I had to confront the issue head-on.
I am not yet in the field but I'm sure changes of this nature occur quite frequently. As a project manager you have to be able to deal with constant change and become adaptable. Also preparing staff in many roles and/or placing someone else in that position would suffice.
