Anticlue

Developing a Project Team

Developing a project team improves the overall competencies and collaborations among team mates. This improvement will eventually result in enhanced project performance. The goals of developing a project team is to increase the team’s skill sets and increase trust among teammates.

The inputs to developing a project team are:

• Project Staff Assignments – Project Staff Assignments is a detailed list of the people who are on the team.
• Staffing management Plan – The staffing management plan identifies the way to develop the team, guidelines documenting staff acquisition and release, the timetable, training needs, recognition, compliance, and safety.
• Resource Availability – Resource availability information lists when team members are available to partake in team development activities.

Developing a synergistic project team means knowing who your team members are, helping them build upon their strengths and overcoming their weaknesses while promoting productive working relationships within the team. There are common tools and techniques to develop a project team. They are:

• General Management Skills – The soft skills or interpersonal skills help motivate a team’s performance and collaboration through empathy, influence, communication, creativity, and facilitation.
• Training – Training encompasses improving the skills and knowledge of team members. Possible training methods are classroom training, online learning, on-the-job training, mentoring or coaching
• Team-Building Activities – Team-building activities encourage communication, trust, and collaboration among teammates.
• Ground Rules – Ground rules establish clear expectations regarding acceptable behavior by project team members. The overall teams commitment to ground rules decreases misunderstanding and increases productivity.
• Co-Location – Co-location is the placement of all or most of the active team members in the same physical location to increase team-building opportunities.
• Recognition and Rewards – Recognition and rewards improve project work by achieving recognition and rewarding desired behaviors.
• Establish Empathy – Being empathic is the listening and understanding how the individual team member is feeling. There is a simple process that can be used to establish empathy: encourage openness, restate concerns, reflect, and summarize.

Developing a project team is an ongoing process that needs to be assessed on an ongoing basis. When tools and techniques have been used to develop the project team, the project manager or project management team needs to assess whether the team's effectiveness has improved. The single output from developing a project team is team performance assessment.

• Team Performance Assessment – As the team’s performance improves some indicators to measure the team’s effectiveness are:
  • Improvements in skills which allow an individual to perform assigned activities with increased effectiveness.
  • Improvements in competencies and sentiments which will help the team perform better as a group
  • Reduced staff turnover rate.

Team performance assessment allows project managers to recognize improvements, but it also highlights any difficulties so they can be addressed. If improvements are not noted or problems arise, you may need to revisit some of the tools and techniques you used to develop your project team and start again.