Project Team

4 Key excerpts on "Project Team"

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  eBook - ePub

  Project Management Leadership

  Building Creative Teams

  • Rory Burke, Steve Barron(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  A Project Team can be defined as a number of people who work closely together to achieve shared common goals. Through interaction and collaboration the team strives to enhance its creativity, innovation, problem solving, decision making, support and work performance.

  From the definitions, a team implies a number of people working together to achieve results, while a group of people (in project management speak) implies a collection of individuals who, although they might be working on the same project, do not necessarily interact with each other (see Figure 12.1 ). This is often the case when the project manager coordinates the project with the people individually. Under such conditions, unity of project purpose is a myth.

  Figure 12.1 : Project Team Arrangements

  1. Project Teams vs. Project Lifecycle

  The project lifecycle can be used to subdivide the Project Teams by project phase. This is a logical approach because, by definition, each phase produces a different set of deliverables and, therefore, requires a different team membership with a different set of skills. Consider the teams outlined in Figure 12.2 .

  Figure 12.2 : Project Teams vs. Project Lifecycle

  Although Figure 12.2 implies there could be different team membership for each phase, in practice, the teams need to be interlinked for consistency and understanding and alignment with the company vision, requirements and business case.

  The project lifecycle shows the relative position of the teams within each phase, and how their scope of work and objectives within each phase are interlinked by a common thread to produce the phase deliverables and, ultimately, to implement corporate strategy and achieve the corporate long-term objectives. The Project Team analysis identifies the different teams so that their requirements can be influenced, aligned and managed.

  2. Why Companies Use Project Teams

  Project Teams offer companies an efficient and effective way of managing multi-disciplined projects in a competitive environment. Consider the needs and benefits of working in Project Teams shown in Table 12.1

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  Projects Without Boundaries

  Successfully Leading Teams and Managing Projects in a Virtual World

  • Russ J. Martinelli, James M. Waddell, Tim J. Rahschulte(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  3

  How effective a Project Team is depends on how well members work together in creating the work product and achieving the project objectives. This is commonly known as teamwork. A good working definition of teamwork is “the process of working collaboratively with a group of people in order to achieve a common goal.”4

  Good teamwork is rooted by a set of shared values that enables important behaviors including listening and constructively responding to the points of view of other team members, providing support to each other on the team, and being positive and supportive to the accomplishments of others on the team.5 Teamwork is further encouraged and achieved during the life of the project through good communication and collaboration practices, mutual respect, appropriate processes, and clarity in decision making procedures.

  Not all Project Teams are created equal. All projects consist of a team of people who perform the work intended. Some Project Teams seem to consistently perform at a higher level than others. A high-performance team is one that consistently exceeds the expectations of customers, sponsors, and senior management. Normally, what comes to mind when most of us think of high-performance teams is a sense of accomplishment that goes beyond expectations. Jon Katzenbach, a leading author and practitioner in organizational strategies, accurately describes a high-performance team as “a group that meets all the conditions of real teams, and has members who are also deeply committed to each other's personal growth and success. That commitment usually transcends the team and the team has internalized the philosophy that if one of us fails, we all fail.”6

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  eBook - ePub

  Managing Technology-Based Projects

  Tools, Techniques, People and Business Processes

  • Hans J. Thamhain(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Effective project leaders are social architects who can foster a climate of active participation by involving people at all organizational levels in the planning, formation, and execution of projects. They also can build alliances with support organizations and upper management to ensure organizational visibility, priority, resource availability, and overall support for sustaining the team effort beyond its startup phase. Accomplishing these activities requires that project managers possess carefully developed skills in leadership, administration, organization, and technical expertise. These activities also demand that managers possess the ability to engage top management and to ensure visibility for their projects by using organizational media, management reviews, and cross-functional networking throughout the project’s life cycle.

  The result is that technology-based projects can be managed to accomplish the project goals when the Project Team works in an environment that helps them thrive. The concepts and empirical data summarized in this chapter show that under the right conditions, Project Teams can produce great results, in spite of tough requirements, high project complexities, and difficult budget/schedule constraints.

  18.8 SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS AND CONCLUSIONS

  The following key points were made in this chapter:

  • Effective teamwork is critical to project performance for all projects. However, team deficiencies affect project performance more severely in large and technologically complex undertakings that have to deal with people from many different functional groups, support organizations, partners, contractors, government and nongovernment organizations.
  • The first formal framework of team management evolved with the human relations movement in the early 1900s, followed by many refinements that led to the current body of knowledge, which connects to five overlapping subsystems: (1) people, (2) project work, (3) organizational process, (4) project tools and techniques, and (5) leadership.
  • Project performance consists of a complex array of variables, difficult to define and measure. Most managers include in their project and team performance evaluations some metrics of the following six categories: (1) deliverables, (2) schedules, (3) cost, (4) risk, (5) enterprise benefits, and (6) stakeholder/customer satisfaction. The specific measures selected for determining team/project performance are called key performance indicators (KPI).

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  Project Management For Dummies - UK

  • Nick Graham(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • For Dummies

    (Publisher)

  A team is a collection of people who are committed to common goals and who depend on one another to do their jobs and who share an identity and purpose. A loyalty develops where someone feels that if, for example, they don’t do a job well then they let the team down, not just themselves. There’s much more on teams and team performance in Chapter 13. Just how much involvement you will have in creating effective teams depends on the nature and particularly the size of your project. If you’re in a large project, you will have Team Leaders who are primarily responsible for the team-building aspects. However, even then, you have a role in establishing a project identity and encouraging Team Leaders in their team-building work. You may even get involved in assisting with the team-building such as by going along to give project briefings. If you do have Team Leaders, your leadership role must tread the normal careful path in management of being supportive and engaged on the one hand but not interfering or undermining Team Leader authority on the other. In a smaller project, you may be running the team, and in that case the team-building work falls entirely to you. Defining your project procedures When you create the Project Management Plan (PMP – see Chapter 2 for more on this), and the Communications Plan within it, you will develop the procedures that you and your teams use in the day-to-day work. The word ‘procedures’ may sound bureaucratic and something only relevant to big projects. The procedures for your project may be very simple though, and having them means that your staff will know how to communicate (such as to report a newly identified risk). In turn, that clarity will help avoid misunderstanding, communication breakdown and sometimes even conflict. At a minimum, develop procedures for the following: Communication: These processes involve sharing project-related information in writing and verbally

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