Team Building

Team building is a project focused process that builds and develops shared goals, interdependence, trust, commitment and accountability among team members.

Managing the "Meeting from Hell!"

Project Manager Sherry Martin couldn't stop thinking about her last team meeting as she walked down the hall towards her office. Slamming her office door behind her, she let out an exasperated scream and looked for something to punch! Her team was driving her absolutely crazy and she channelled Scarlett O'Hara as she proclaimed, "I will never run a meeting like that again!" Her problem in a nutshell boiled down to three really difficult personalities that continually recurred on her team. These personalities were indeed a cancer not just infecting the team and its results but also spreading throughout the group and impacting the other team members as well.

Identifying Performance Issues With Your Project Team

The phrase "project manager" is a bit of a misnomer; while project managers do manage projects, they deliver them by managing a project team that does the work of the project. How successful they are at managing that team will go a long way to determining the success or failure of the project. Perhaps the most difficult (and certainly the most unpleasant) aspect of managing the high performance team is dealing with issues of poor performance.

Why is People Capability Maturity Model Necessary?

The Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute developed the People Capability Maturity Model (P-CMM) to help businesses manage knowledge workers across global borders, as well as between greying and millennial generations. Similar to CMMI, P-CMM has five maturity levels, but the model is focused on the need to improve the capabilities of a workforce as a differentiating factor from the competition.

Has Your Project Team Considered all the Key Dimensions of the Problem?

Many readers have mentioned to me that they feel that a lot of the projects they sponsor (even the successful ones) are often on "automatic pilot." This typically happens once the project teams feel that they understand the problem and have decided on what they believe to be the most appropriate direction for solving the key issues facing the project.

Putting People Management Back into Project Management

No one will ever be able to convince me that the most challenging component of project management is the science behind it. The way in which we need to pull people together to be a high performance team over a relatively short period of time is the most challenging part of project management. This article will focus on the communication issues within the project team, in particular, the people management aspect.

Recipe for Great Virtual Teamwork: The Right Communications Tools at the Right Time

You've just finished the project kick-off meeting with your new virtual team. Everyone seems clear about roles, responsibilities, deliverables and deadlines. So far, so good. But, as you think about the magnitude and velocity of the work that lies ahead, you realise how critical a well-orchestrated team communications plan will be to getting the work done. This article offers some simple guidelines to keep in mind as you assemble a communications plan to make it easy for virtual team members to communicate and collaborate.

Building the High-Performance Global Workforce

Companies that can work cheaper, faster, and better are well-positioned to develop and market products and services that give higher value to their customers. But how do project managers and business leaders effectively manage geographically dispersed workforces?

10 Steps to Finding a Project Manager

Project managers, when you hire well, can become your most favourite person on the planet. Hiring a good project manager means you can sit back and relax knowing that the project tasks are being taken care of in a professional, productive, and profitable manner. It frees up your time, reduces or even eliminates stress, and increases your bottom line. However a bad hire can affect profits, increase stress which can kick your blood pressure up to dangerous levels and waste a tremendous amount of time and money. Here's how to hire a qualified project manager.

Discovering Future Performers in Your Team

Browse up on your organisation's competency requirements and set more informed business directions concerning your people. Management needs a checkpoint to determine if performance meets organisational requirements, given the knowledge and skills set of the employees. This is the birth of competency analysis.

Exploiting Feedback to Improve Bottom-Line Performance

While feedback is vital to the growth and sustained success of any business, regardless of industry, employees or customer base, it may often be met with some level of resistance or uncertainty. For some, feedback seems to equate to, and therefore is received or delivered as, (negative) criticism, when in reality, this belief or response is unwarranted.

Use Your Whole Brain: Leveraging Right-Brained Thinking in a Left-Brained World

For organisations, flexing the right side of the brain can dramatically improve decision making, team building and innovation, and ultimately drive greater organisational performance. In fact, whole brain thinking is a secret weapon that successful organisations are using to evolve their business to the next level, and stay ahead of the competition. When you combine left-brained data-driven decision making skills with non-linear right-brained thinking, the result is greater insight and more well-rounded experience that will ultimately help you arrive at better solutions to complex problems.

Getting Work Done: The Human Side of Project Management

Project management is defined as the art and science of getting work done with the active co-operation of individuals and organisations who are directly or indirectly involved with the project. This includes Senior Management, Project Sponsors(s), Customers, End-users, Stakeholders, Team Members, Sub-contractors, Vendors and Consultants. Given the reality of minimal authority and total responsibility for the outcome of the project, the Project Manager's biggest challenge consists of "Getting Work Done."

Why Project Managers Should Coach

Coaching is a highly effective management tool and yet, I have met only a small number of project managers who adopt a coaching style when supporting their staff. The unfortunate truth is that many project managers do not understand coaching and have received little or no formal training.

Resourcing Project Managers

Ironically, although resourcing production team members is a significant part of a project manager's role, very little focus is placed on resourcing the project managers themselves. Because of this, I've encountered many project managers that are overwhelmed, worn out, and in many ways, ineffective. Over time, I've developed some generic strategies to help directors allocate an appropriate amount of work to project managers. In this article, I'll discuss some simple ideas to help get started.

The Importance of Working Together With Your Team

The principle of working together with your team should underpin how you operate. Managing people doesn't just mean acting as overseer, to see that they get their work done satisfactorily. It means involving people throughout the team in a creative role, to ensure that together you are all able to succeed.

Project Management: What Type of Organisation is Best?

Consider a company that is about to embark upon a project for the first time. A competent project manager is available, but this firm has never had to handle a complex project before, and now has to set up the most suitable organisation. If asked to advise, the project manager might immediately be faced with the question that often causes much controversy, should the company take all the key people destined to work on the project and place them under his/her direct control. Or, at the other extreme would it be better to have a weak or balanced functional matrix?

10 Ways to Inspire Your Team

Inspire. Just the word itself causes us to pause and think. We may remember our own personal heroes like Martin Luther King or Mother Theresa or a teacher or mentor who brought out the best in us and showed us the power of one person.

Project Management Goes Live With Virtual Team Collaboration

Web collaboration technologies enable project management teams to meet virtually with full audio-visual interaction, irrespective of their multiple locations. These solutions work by allowing one team member to securely share their desktop and its content in ad-hoc or scheduled meetings with their colleagues, and allow anyone to access and contribute to the information in real time.

5 Essentials To Project Team Success

To maximise the contribution of project teams, a number of essentials need to be recognised. The good news is that the essentials to team success aren't expensive, don't require the expenditure of large amounts of capital or expense money, and don't require new bricks and mortar. The further news and biggest challenge is that the only change needed to be made to implement the essentials to project team success is behaviour.

Five Steps to a Winning Project Team

As healthcare executives work to increase efficiency and decrease costs in a dynamic healthcare environment, they often undertake projects such as technology implementation, operational and process improvements and facility planning. These projects typically require the formation of collaborative teams comprising hospital leadership and staff as well as project managers and support staff from vendors and outside consulting firms. Executives must be prepared to establish efficient project teams that focus on communication and collaboration to achieve success.

Nine Ways to Contribute to Project Team Success

The world of work has changed. It used to be that most of us worked as a part of a process, whether on an assembly line, managing interactions with customers, or any one of a thousand other processes. Processes are ongoing, repeatable and never have an ending. If the nature of our work has changed, it is important to think about some of the skills that will help us succeed in this different world.

Building Your Project Team

Suppose that you as a manager have been asked to form a team for the life of a particular project. How should you set about choosing your people and forming them into a well functioning group?

Stealth Team Building

The thought of "team building" often creates very diverse reactions from project team members. Many people enjoy the potential for increased camaraderie and getting to know more about their peers; others have a very negative reaction. This article looks at an alternative "stealth" approach to team building.

Helping Project Teams Succeed

How often do we hear project managers complaining that they have been set-up to fail? If you're like me then quite often. I am sure that most organisations want their project managers to succeed. If this is true where does the "set-up to fail" idea come from. Could it be that the organisation doesn't have an environment that supports success?

Developing a High Performance Project Team

Much is written in Project Management journals about every conceivable facet of project teams. Topics about their organisation, culture, communication with clients, problem solving skills, etc. are virtually endless. There are lots of rules, tips, and suggestions about what they should do but not as much on how to do it. If you aren't sure how, this article will get you started in the right direction.

Managing Virtual Project Teams

These are interesting times for managing systems development projects. In the old days (as late as the 1980's), whenever a development project was initiated, it was necessary to form a project team at a centralised geographical location in order to expedite communications between project members. But now we live in an age of electronic communications that provides greater flexibility in terms of allowing workers to work just about anywhere.

Virtual Teaming Soft Skills Relevant to all Projects

One of the most critical aspects of project management leadership is the effective use of communication to facilitate the team process. Effective communication is one of the key enablers of building cohesive teams and is critical to the successful management of key stakeholders. The probability of communication breakdown is intensified in a virtual environment. Since virtual teams are fast becoming the rule rather than the exception, we will all be required to use these skills at some point in our project leadership careers.

People, Process, and Predicting Project Success

Great people, people with sufficient functional skills and domain expertise can trump process, good or bad. Good process, process appropriate for the context, will help those people. But great people can overcome bad process to deliver a good product.

Six Ways to Give Proper Project Leadership

Many things influence project management today. When we look at projects today compared to fifteen or twenty years ago, we notice a big change. In the old traditional setting, the boss might not even ask for any input, but today team involvement is critical. In a team setting, people are encouraged to give ideas and make decisions. This change governs how projects today are run.

Choosing the Best Team for Your Project

Human Resource Management is needed everywhere. At home, at the office, and especially when working on a project with a group of people. Using human resources during a project requires getting the most effective use of the people involved with the project. This includes everyone associated with the project: sponsors, customers, partners, and individual contributors. There are three major aspects of project human resource management: organisational planning, staff acquisition, and team development.