HR, Communication, and Integration Management

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Executive Summary

On 19^th July 2007, the Victorian government made a formal announcement that it intended to develop a 150-gigalitre desalination project. After feasibility studies were conducted, the project was declared feasible. The government made its final decision to commit its financial resources to develop the project scheduled for completion by December 2011.

Although the project lagged behind time so that it was not yet commissioned by 2012, Victorian desalination project can be deployed as an important case example for analysis of the roles of human resources, communication, and integration management in a successful execution of a project.

Through the discussion of the case of Victorian desalination project, this paper reveals that consideration of the importance of managing stakeholders who have vested interests in the implementation of any project is a critical aspect for the success of a project. Additionally, this paper investigates the organisational structure of the management of the Victorian desalination project by providing criticisms on its appropriateness.

This structure is identified as hierarchical since it promotes the flow of information from top to bottom. The paper recommends alteration of such an approach in management to give a room for the bottom-up flow of information. Finally, consideration of the importance of organisation and proper management of work teams are given some attention.

Through discussion of the case of the Victorian desalination project, the paper applauds and associates success of the project to the creation of a teamwork culture amid the varying diversity differences of all personnel charged with the execution of the mega project.

Introduction

Every project is executed with the help of several people from various professional backgrounds. For these people to function effectively to achieve the goals and objectives of projects, it is necessary to have an effective force of human resource management in place to ensure that all concerns of employees are integrated with the anticipated functions of the project and processes.

Without the cognition of the functions of human resource management in enhancing effective organisational communication, even potentially viable projects may fail at the design or the implementation phase. With these arguments in mind, this paper intends to conduct an analysis of the Victorian desalination project from the context of human resources, communication, and integration management.

Project background

The Victorian government announced it intended to construct a desalination plant with a capacity of 150-gigalitres of water. This announcement brought into being the Victorian desalination project on 19 July 2007 (Norimitsu 2010, p.12).

The major objective of the plant was to enhance the augmentation of water supplies within Geelong and Melbourne areas and their surroundings. The project was to be implemented in a manner that would make sure that the aims, goals, and objectives of its creation would be precisely achieved within time and resources constraints. This implied that the Victorian desalination project was a temporary endeavour.

Project context

The announcement of the intention to construct an Australian largest desalination plant on 19 July 2007 marked the scope initiation phase. The definition of the capacity of the project (150-billion litre expandable to 200 billion litres) (Kjorstad 2010, p.7) marked the beginning of the scope planning phase. The essence of the scope planning is that all activities that would be undertaken would be geared towards the achievement of this stipulated capacity.

For the Victorian desalination, project’s scope planning facilitated the process of allocation of time and monetary resources to the project. More importantly, the definition of the project’s scope facilitated the allocation of the appropriate human resource to various facets of the project.

Stakeholders

Proper management of stakeholders’ relations is central to the success of any project. Scholarly studies done by Jiang and Klein (1999), Lemon, Bowitz, Burn, and Hackney (2002), Meredith and Mantel (2000), and Turner and Muller (2003) provide evidence that the failure of many projects is related to the conceived roles and purpose of a project by stakeholders together with various project teams.

Cognition of this evidence makes Mitchell, Agle, and Wood (2009) argue, “The key to forming successful project relationships is the understanding that different stakeholders have different expectations of the project and different definitions of project success” (p.856).

The main argument here is that there is scholarly the contention that failure or success of any project is directly dependent on the perceptions and anticipations of the project’s value by stakeholders. Satisfaction of these anticipations or perceptions is directly influenced by the capacity of the managerial arm of an organisation to subtly handle issues such as organisational politics and/or engage all stakeholders appropriately to orient them to the desired project outcomes.

The Victorian desalination project attracted immense obstacles related to the perception of environmental degradations and misplacement of communities from their native land. This prompted the project management team to hold stakeholders’ joint meetings in the effort to ensure that every one who is affected by the project felt that he or she was incorporated into the project’s decision-making processes.

In the effort to engage all stakeholders who perceived themselves as heavily influenced by the Victorian desalination project, various stakeholders’ risks were defined, with a task force being put forward to look into how such challenges could be addressed. According to Fletcher et al. (2003), stakeholders are all persons who have stakes in the process of implementation of a given project.

All such interests were considered viable risks that would influence the realisation of the goals, objectives, and aims of the Victorian desalination project. Consequently, the project management team decided to deploy the knowledge of risk management to help in harnessing possible risks associated with stakeholders that would impair the success of the project.

Project risk management is the identification, responding, and analysing of risks that would be encountered in a project (Alexander & Sheedy 2005, p.125: Kallman 2011, p.122).

The main objective is to “maximise the probability and consequences of positive events besides minimising the probability and consequences of adverse events to project objectives” (Mitchell 2008, p.71). In case of the Victorian desalination project, the government, states, and the contracted company agreed to assume various risks.

Organisational structure

The organisational structure is divided into a number of levels of positions with each having different levels of authority. The project director assumes the top-most position. The role of this position is to lead, establish, and develop project work teams to aid in driving performance together with the construction of various elements of the projects to meet the environmental standards and the established stakeholder relationships.

Second in the rank is the assistant project director. The role of the position involves the identification of the likely project trouble areas, mitigate such troubles, and to ensure precise achievement of the project requirements while guaranteeing that appropriate management practices are upheld.

The project area director is charged with spearheading area teams and ensuring integration together with maintaining constant and reliable collaborations of all project area teams. The director also foresees the integration of procurement, design, and engineering functions.

Several scholars criticise the bureaucratic form of organisational leadership by claiming that it hinders innovation and creativity. Amid this criticism, it is important to note that the bureaucratic form of organisational structure is important in a situation where compliance is required (Stewart, Hedge & Lester, 2006). A project is an endeavour that operates under fixed time and financial constraints.

This means that it is important for all personnel charged with execution of a project to follow the established procedure and processes in a precise way and in accordance with the established project implementation plan. In this extent, compliance is crucial as it may be exemplified by the realisation of the Victorian desalination project’s goals and objectives although the project encountered a failure in terms of successful completion within the projected time.

Roles, responsibilities, and relationships of the project team members

In the process of implementation of any project, different managerial and team members have different roles and responsibilities. Although all areas of project implementation were worth giving sufficient attention by the Victorian desalination project implementation team, critical emphasis was placed on environmental considerations.

However, at all levels, managers were charged with the role of leading team members as good examples and by paying incredible attention to the preset internal environmental standards especially the aquatic standards. In fact, according to Kjorstad, “environmental responsibility, promotion of environmental awareness, and the encouragement of ownership are the key approaches for environmental management implementation strategy for water projects” (2010, p.37).

For the Victorian desalination project, embracing this approach in defining the roles and responsibilities of the project management personnel ensured continuous improvement of the project implementation strategies while eliminating any condition that may be nonconforming to any standards.

In the realm of human resource management, literature on human resource management contend that HR is established to handle issues related to employees including enhancing motivation and conflicts resolutions.

The noble functions of HR within an organisation are inspired by the perceptions that people working for any organisation act as the source of competitive advantage especially by noting that they cannot be optimised using economic theories in the same manner like other factors of production such as capital and land (Ollapally & Bhatnagar, 2009).

For the Victorian desalination project, it was clear that the project could not be implemented within the stipulated time constraints without having well-motivated and self-directed employees. Thus, human resource management was established to handle the relations between the Victorian desalination project, employees, and other stakeholders.

For the Victorian desalination project, the HR was charged with the roles of enhancing employees’ motivations and commitment to their organisational roles in the attempt to ensure that all employees collectively engage in activities that are aligned with the organisational goals and objectives. Scholarly, evidence reveals that the provision of safe working environments is positively correlated with motivation of employees (Pfeiffer & Gellar, 2003).

This means that employees are less motivated while working in an environment they perceive as posing any danger to the safety of their lives. The nature of the work of the Victorian desalination project made it clear that promotion of safe working environment was not negated in the enumeration of roles and responsibilities of different people.

Indeed, the achievement of the roles of different personnel required the integration of responsibilities because projects are driven by the desire to achieve common goals and objectives amid the different administrative and managerial hierarchy levels. This highlights the necessity of teamwork development together with the need to address proactively the challenges that induce conflicts among work team members.

Team development and conflict

Work teams develop best when adequate measures are in place to ensure there is no struggle and competition for resources. Every work team wants to achieve better results in relation to the other. Since a project is an entity subdivided into a number of elements, it becomes important to ensure that there is knowledge sharing among all organisational stakeholders especially when such stakeholders work as different work teams (Meredith & Mantel, 2007).

For the Victorian desalination project, staffing and structuring of teams for environmental project are in a manner that guarantees sufficient availability of resources for ensuring smooth and successful implementation of the project plans. Managing work teams this way is essential in ensuring that there is precise compliance to the established environmental standards.

Several factors instigate work teams conflict. One of the major factors that contribute to animosity among work team members is the failure to embrace other people’s diversity. In fact, many scholars have acclaimed cute management of workforce diversity as having the ability to improve workforce productivity, improvement of workforce engagement, fostering reduction of staff absenteeism, and an increase of workforce turn over by about five folds (Dessler 2004).

It is the function of the HR to handle all issues influencing employees within an organisation including any differences in diversity in the effort to mitigate organisational conflicts. Victorian desalination project is a major endeavour that brings together people from diverse backgrounds.

It called for the HR to consider different ways of integrating differences in diversity among all work team members in the endeavour to enhance team development and/or reduce diversity differences that are likely to create workforce conflicts. This was done by the development of a common project culture. This culture was driven by the common goal of completing all the project tasks to the set out standards.

While focusing on diversity as a strategic initiative for the Victorian desalination project to gain in terms achievement of the project requirements within strict time constraints, HR management realised that diversity brings together people from different cultural backgrounds. This means that diversity has the impact of creating cultural conflicts.

To resolve these conflicts, the HR management approaches are important in helping to create a common organisational culture by helping employees to understand that different people have different abilities and beliefs and that these differences should not be permitted to influence the way people relate with one another (Ollapally & Bhatnagar, 2009).

The HR is charged with the role of maintaining employees’ discipline, as prescribed by HR approaches. It matches with the strategic decision of the Victorian desalination project leaders to deploy diversity to enhance the success by treating any conflicts arising from cultural differences as an act of indiscipline and negation to comply with the established organisational culture that is set by the Victorian desalination project requirements.

Conclusion

Projects are executed in an environment dominated by persons who have stakes and often with people who resist change. For the Victorian desalination project in Australia, communities viewed the project as posing dangers to their environment and/or having the capacity to take away their land. However, they did not consider the benefits accruing from the project in terms of the provision of better and reliable water sources.

As argued in this paper, these challenges made it relevant to proactively develop strategies for management of stakeholders while also developing an appropriate organisational structure and methodologies for enhancing work team performance in the execution process of the Victorian desalination project.

Recommendations

The implementation process of the Victorian desalination project depended heavily on the authoritative form of project governance. Hence, the chief goal was to ensure that employees and contractors precisely complied with the directives issued by directors. Consequently, the project progressed as directed, but not as per contractors and employees’ preferred way of executing various project tasks.

Although this was vital in ensuring that the project was executed as planned, review and changes in plans are often important especially where loopholes are discovered.

It is recommended that the Victorian desalination projects should have been flexible in its hierarchical system of governance to permit minor changes in project tasks by those who are in the actual implementation level in the effort to permit innovation and creativity. However, this ought to have been done subject to approval by the respective directors.

References

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Dessler, G 2004, Management principles and practices for tomorrow’s leaders, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River.

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Mitchell, K, Wimbush, N, Harty, C, Lampe, G & Sharpley, G 2008, Environment Effects Statement: Victorian Desalination Project Report of the Inquiry to the minister for planning, Australian Institute of Publication, Australia.

Norimitsu, O 2010, ‘Asia pacific: Arid Australia Sips Seas Water, but at Cost’, New York Times, 12 Oct., pp. 12-13.

Ollapally, A & Bhatnagar, J 2009, ‘The Holistic Approach to Diversity Management: HR Implications,’ The Indian Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 44 no. 3, pp. 454-472.

Pfeiffer, E & Gellar, S 2003, ‘Scared safe: How to use fear to motivate safety involvement’, Occupational Health and Safety, vol. 6 no.1, pp. 6-10.

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Turner, J & Muller, R 2003, ‘On The Nature of The Projects as a Temporally Organisation’, International Journal of Project Management, vol. 21 no.6, pp. 1-8.

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