Applications of the Concept of Accountability in a Project Context

Speaker A I think that one of the areas of work in terms of what I've been trying to do is that the books are pitched level five, level six people. And translating this into level one, level two, level three work is a big task. And some of the times of the articles that I've written myself tried to, without pushing Elliot interface, explaining how these models could be used in order to explain, for example, how you in today's environment how you might better order specialist work. That you've got people in project teams today and you have a project manager, what's his authority with regard to the members of his project team? And I've suggested in the article, which I've written, that an approach to this might say that the project manager had veto of all the members in his project team, which few project managers do at the moment they're brought in by the organizations or employers. But it's a complicated subject on its own. And I remember talking to Elliot about how he did any thinking in this particular area and he did say to me that know that it was an areas that he needed to work on, to explore, but you only have a certain finite number of years in your life. So I guess that it was one of those projects that was never completed in that sense. Yeah, that was I was involved in a project which they put a project to deem in a sort of developmental phase. And they brought in within the project team itself a whole mixture of so there were employees of the client of the organization, there were employees of contractors, and there were contractors, and there were all sorts of different variations of that. Most of these people on a month's notice because that was the terms in which it was being paid for. But they'd been employed directly within within the team, not as part of the functional overview with the functions within the organizations. And when the project had to close because funding was withdrawn, these people who were members of the employees of the organization were left in limbo because the project manager said they're nothing to do with me. I don't have any managerial authority of these team members and the people and the functional managers within the organization said they're nothing to do with me. I wasn't asked about whether I had no hand in their recruitment and all the rest of it. So we had a bunch of people that were left in a very parlor situation and being in scarce they all disappeared off down the road to the nearest consultants. But it brought home to me that the fact that if you are going to employ people on project teams, employ people, then you've got to be very clear about what their relationship is, who's their manager. In fact, I'm indicating that the use of comanager type roles was very useful in this thing because people say right we've got the functional manager within the organization, the permanent organization. Part of his responsibility should be to supply the project manager with the right specialists in order to carry out the project, albeit that the project manager may not be employee of that same organization, even if it came to that. You need to bring in subcontractors or contractors or other organizations. You needed to take an overview of the competence of these people to carry out a project which you were trying to execute. And this is not something that they could shrug off. But unless you're explicit about it, it just doesn't happen. Because they say, well, I wasn't involved necessarily. So that constitutional view of laying it all in black and white, as they did within Glacier, could have avoided many of the problems. Because once you're in it, it's too late. You can't get out of it.