03 June 2009

Hold People Responsible and Accountable

Generally responsibility for a project means: delivering on plans and commitments, being part of the team, acknowledging when there are problems and being willing to adjust personal priorities in favor of the overall project priorities.

First of all inside of each project and teams there must exist a set of rules that must be respected by all team members. For not respecting these rules there must be also penalties because most of the times people respect rules just because they fear the penalties.

Responsability also means being honest with yourself, understanding and accepting the quality of your work and the stage of your project. You cannot fool yourself because this only leads to failure.

Each person involved in a project has his own responsability. The Project Manager for example is responsible for clearly defining what is expected from each member of the team. The members of the team are responsible for maintaining conssistency, for asking help when they need, for reporting the problems that appear, for asking advices when they need.

Responsability also means feeling compasion and understanding a team member that doesn't fit in the project team and trying to help him. But this should never overcome incompetence because the final goal of the project counts the most.

Even if it's hard to do it, sometimes responsability also means removing someone from the team when he's guilty for intolerable situations like: abusive treatment or language, any discriminatory or derogatory words or actions, violence (including verbal assault) or any other physically inappropriate behavior.

Mainly responsability is knowing all the time what you want to do for that project, how it's supposed to be and dealing with people according to this. A lack of responsability can lead to a failure or to disputes between team members that's why it's good to maintain the objectivity no matter what.

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