"Managing Stress on IT Projects"

Event Report

On Tuesday, 4th April 2006 at HP‘s Amen Corner offices in Bracknell, members of BCS PROMS-G and their guests, were treated to a presentation by Stewart Hill (www.regener8.co.uk).

According to Stewart, there’s a fine line between ‘Stretch’ and ‘Strain’. It has long been recognised that fine tuning an organisation or project team to ensure there is always pressure to keep the team at full stretch, is a well used approach to help ensure timely delivery. Push it too far or for too long and the situation can become counter-productive. Stewart described a model of ‘the performance curve‘ that helps to demonstrate what happens when a situation moves over the tipping point from stress to strain.

So far, so good, and pretty much in line with most PMs expectations. What was unexpected, was just how much can be done to both identify the symptoms at an early stage, and then deal with the fall out if it happens. For a few, stress is not usually a problem because they work in supportive organisations, but for most of us, the commercial pressures ensure that stress is a frequent issue for resource managers, PMs and Team managers in any high performance environment. However, stress counselling is not usually in the toolkit for most PMs, and whilst much of the response is designed to ensure that legislative safeguards have been followed about what to do, Stewart offered practical guidance on HOW to go about this.

Stewart has been a project manager for many years having to cope with a variety of stressful situations, from working for unsupportive managers in risky project situations to managing subordinates who are close to burnout. He has worked in conjunction with the International Stress Management Association to codify the symptoms and the underlying causes and to offer help advice and guidance on how to deal with them. His approach is aimed at the team manager who wishes to avoid the team getting into stressful situations. Inevitably it focuses on team managers protecting themselves through compliance with legislative procedures, but quite rightly emphasises how important good communications is in both avoiding stressful situations and in dealing with them if they arise.

Given that most projects are critically dependent upon the health and wellbeing of project teams and other supporting personnel, its surprising that so few of us include any element of stress identification and management in our Risk Assessments. If we wish to incorporate something in our risk assessment, Stewart demonstrated a self assessment diagnostic tool that is available free from the Health and Safety Executive to help identify causes of stress.

As ever, HP hosted the event in excellent fashion, and it became obvious in the welcome and introduction delivered by Ian Whittle, that HP appears to be an enlightened organisation providing a carefully considered package of assistance for employees. This is organised as both stress avoidance approaches, self help for the stressed, and specific help for those with a more specialised need.

The audience, from mainly large corporate private sector organisations, (although the public sector was represented) scored the event highly in terms of both content and delivery. The questions, both during and after the talk demonstrated a high degree of engagement. I hope that what they have learned will help keep their projects running on the less risky side of the thin line between stress and strain!

Stewart's presentation is available for download (589Kb) together with the HSE Analysis Tool (1952Kb)