Metrics visibility to the project team members

Today going through the posts of the people/organizations I follow in Twitter I have found one from Harvard Business Review titled "Project Managers should share their stress". Inmediately it has caught my attention and I have clicked it for reading it.

The article is based on the assumption that the project managers use to hide the information to the rest of the team members, keeping all the metrics for them and the sponsors, creating this an additional stress to us, PMs, as we feel we are the only one responsibles for the results. The suggestion in the article is to have weekly meetings with all the members of the team in order to show them the percentage of work completed and detailed financial information of the project.

From my point of view, this should be a common practice in all the project oriented companies. It is one of the basic points if we want  the team members to feel that they are not only just resources in an spreadsheet or a timeplan, if not that they are key for the success of the project. Moreover, apart from these metrics, we should present to the team members the big picture and how the project you are managing fits in the strategy of the company. In this way, the people working on the project will be able to realize the importance of the tasks they are performing and increase their accountability.

Not only progress and financial status should be visible to them, I use to share as well information like customer perception and satisfaction, steering management action points, sponsors feedback on the status of the project, escalations received, and so on. Basically all the information that will help them to feel more accountable.

A tool very helpful for sharing information are the project sharepoints. From my experience, when a sharepoint is implemented for first time in a project, the only ones who accesses it and shares information is the project manager. It takes sometime till the project team members start to check it on a regular basis. And more time, for making them to upload and share information on it, but at the end is proven to be worthy the time invested in "selling" to them the tool, mostly if the project team members are distributed in different locations and countries and it boosts the communication between all of us.