Assignments with PMPeople

Projects are collaborative endeavors that, if managed professionally, need a project manager focused on management, and a project team to do the actual work. Projects need to be broken down into manageable elements. Assignments are a good way to coordinate teamwork: Separate pieces of work are assigned to one or more people—or they self-assign themselves—to progress in parallel, as separated, focused, specialized sub teams, but with continuous communication and sync points.

Project managers should follow certain processes to get the project or phase finished on time, on budget, within the funding limits, avoiding out of scope work, meeting requirements, delivering high quality products, abiding and enforcing contracting terms with third parties, etc. They report regularly to steering committees, change control boards, PMO, etc. In status review meetings, they don’t report performance and problems only. They try to engage these governance entities to seek the solutions with them. The project manager is not the project owner. The performing organization owns the project. Projects should not be reported on the project level, as a whole, but on each work package. A project work package is the work defined at the lowest level of the work breakdown structure for which cost and duration are estimated and managed.

Project managers lead project teams. Project teams are in charge of technical tasks. Ideally, after team building, the team becomes a synergic group, with its own identity, focused on technical excellence and continuous improvement. Good project managers aim for two outcomes: the project product and the self-managed team, being the last one an organization asset of the highest value. At the individual level, team members grow professionally at high speed during the short term of a project, both their hard and soft skills.

In the project economy, professionals do not belong to isolated business units anymore. Instead, they develop themselves progressively inside the organization, project after project.Managers should control scope, schedule, cost, etc., at the level of the project work packages. It is mostly a waste for them if they manage at the task level. Micromanagement is no good practice. Team members should know what work packages to report timesheets and expenses, but they also need a deeper detail to collaborate effectively as a team.

PMPeople allows projects to be broken down into work packages, and work packages can be decomposed into tasks. Team members should know which work packages they are assigned to, mainly to report timesheets and expenses, but they also need to know their tasks and the information related.

With PMPeople, you can use two types of assignments:

• Work Package Assignments: Every project can be broken down into work packages. Work package #0 represents the whole project. Each work package can be planned and controlled on its health checks, scope, schedule, and cost. Performance reporting can be done at periodic review dates, on the level of the project work packages. Each team member can be assigned to one or more project work packages, and each work package can be done by one or more team members. Work package assignments are good enough to manage timesheets and expenses. Additionally, most management decisions, such as changes in priorities, scope, dates, etc., can be made at the work package level. Use PMPeople work packages not just for projects, but also for operation accounts like sales, vacations, leaves, training, etc.

• Task Assignments: Tasks are works that can be assigned to one or more team members. Tasks can have many attributes, such as description, assignees, collaborators, start and finish dates, percent complete, impediments, dependencies, documents, and other references, etc. Any task can have only two possible states: incomplete or completed. In PMPeople, any task belongs to a project work package. Global tasks belong to work package #0. Task performance can be aggregated on the corresponding project work packages to help project managers make decisions.

In PMPeople, team members can only see their assignments if the project is in execution state. That is, all assignment data are hidden to team members if project state is initiating, planning, closing or archived. This is useful to avoid distractions to team members, but also to ensure they cannot report timesheets or expenses if the project is not in execution.

Frequently Asked Questions

What types of assignments are used in PMPeople?

PMPeople supports Work Package Assignments and Task Assignments. Work packages group project components, while tasks provide detailed team-level work items.

When can team members view their assignments?

Team members can only view assignments when the project is in the “Execution” state. Assignments are hidden during initiating, planning, closing, or archived states.

Why are assignments important in project collaboration?

Assignments allow parallel progress across specialized teams, enable performance tracking at the work package level, and help avoid micromanagement.