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I am a Project Manager in my Software Engineering class for a software development project that deals with sports management. The issue I am running into is the fact that most of my development team is not very motivated to work on this project because they are not interested in sports. How can I motivate them to work on this project?

code writer 3000
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    You are taking an unidirectional approach on the matter. Do you really think that's the only reason they are unmotivated? Because they don't like sports? What's the larger context? What do you think should be their intrinsic motivation for doing this project? – Bogdan Sep 21 '21 at 06:27
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    They will not be "interested" in most of what they program for the rest of their careers. They need to get used to that. Normally, the motivator is called the "boss". Who is the boss? Who is the person that gave the task and what happens if it's not done? – nvoigt Sep 21 '21 at 10:46

2 Answers2

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As you're talking about a class, I suppose this is an exercise project, not a real one. You may have to talk to the teacher to see what your options are in this situation.

There are several possible approaches:

  • strict: This is an exercise, it does not matter whether the subject interests you, we're going to do this the best we can.
  • creative: (if ok with the teacher) We're translating the problem statement into an interesting subject area, such as agriculture, mecha warfare or whatever.
  • cop-out: Teacher, please assign me to another group, this one isn't willing to work on the exercise.

I don't know what would work for you and your group.

Hans-Martin Mosner
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Students are motivated for school for various reasons: to learn something new, to get a good grade, to finish required credits, etc. This class and the students therein should be no different. Therefore, I think that your diagnosed root cause--dislike of the product they are to build--is likely not accurate. In my purely unscientific, very limited observations, when I saw a gaggle of students who displayed pure lack of motivation, there were systemic issues in that class, e.g., the professor, or maybe it was one of those classes that everyone took as an elective because they had to and they didn't care about the outcome.

At work, when we have teams with low morale and low productivity and we have no way of changing the drivers of the state of morale, we might choose to break work down to its lowest, most concrete task level, make the assignments, follow-up in a rather micro-managed way, and just get those tasks to finish. This approach does not cure what ails the team but the work gets done, albeit with likely quality issues. So my advice would be to try to uncover the true drivers of the lack of motivation but then to also just micro-manage the tasks to get to finish. Micromanagement is not the desired approach...until it is necessary. It might be necessary now.

David Espina
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