RECIPE TO MAKE A MULTI DIVERSITY TEAM TO SUCCEED IN COMPLEX PROJECTS

Abstract

With every change in project environment and climate, consistent and quality delivery is always a challenge. This is because every such change affects the core of project management – Project Resource management- that ripples down into other areas of project management such as project schedule management and project cost management. The core competency needed for the every delivery resides with the team. When such a team in hand consists of members belonging to different generation cohorts, optimized delivery gets more challenging. It is more challenging for project managers who need to consider the responses of every generation cohort in the team and take stable decisions. It could get very demanding for project managers if they fail to understand the difference in team’s response for the same problem or any external stimuli. It is very important thus to understand the work variables that critically influence the behavior of a particular team cohort to better interpret and take intelligent and innovative decisions especially in complex projects. The concept of the paper is directed towards the study of project outcomes that influence generation cohorts and induce multi-generational diversity concerns within a complex project. The objective of this paper is to exhibit the project outcomes influenced by the work variables of cohorts and understand how the cohorts would respond to them. An initial independent examination into the characteristics of the generation cohorts and work variables was done. A detailed listing of work variables followed by classifying them on basis of their impact was done. The work variables are classified as Organizational, Group and Individual variables, which are highly influenced by mutigenerational diversity. This paper intends to bring out the study done on the group category of work variables, which have affected the manner in which the team cohorts had reacted thereby inducing a sequel of events. The researcher collected data from secondary sources and through questionnaires among IT Project managers of large, medium and small projects and arrived at the identification of the work variables that are influenced by multigenerational diversity. The findings of this paper would aid to profile the primary task of a project manager to understand how the complex project team can resource charted based on generations. It also suggests how to respond to each cohort which will lead to innovative project management solutions. When project managers attempt to innovate ideas during such turbulences, there is always a scope of integrating and coping better with external environments’ researcher has attempted to provide a systemic view of these variables and the attempted to understand the effects of such variables on project performance. This would enable project managers to ensure that no issues within the team would derail the core objective of the project. The finding will also suggest how Multigenerational Diversity at work place is to be managed effectively so that projects run successfully with in its scope, schedule and cost constraints.