How representative should the project team be? It ought to represent the many departments or areas of the business. It should also have a blend of disciplines like design, finance, operations, IT etc. It also needs a blend of people with both creative ad analytical flair.
Other dimensions contributing to a project team’s effectiveness
observed on my travels are:
Members must have knowledge of the business
Members must have process knowledge
Members should be free and able to participate,
unencumbered by their day job
Avoid department, team or senior operational managers
Business Knowledge
Whilst this is not an argument against recruiting new employees to
the project team it is a cautionary note regarding corporate culture.
Organisations settle into a way of doing things a so called, ‘custom and
practice’ so any new comers had better get to know about the ‘corporate way’ or
‘culture’ or risk upsetting quite a few people. It is sometimes necessary to
break established norms to achieve real change, but you have to take people
along with you or the change will be impermanent or transient. People who have
worked in an organisation for more than a two years have by osmosis absorbed
organisations way of doing things.
Moreover they will be able to identify colleagues who find change
threatening and those who are open to change. This is useful knowledge when it
becomes time to ‘sell’ the project.Process Knowledge
Project Team members must have knowledge of the business processes for the constituencies they represent. Quite often project team members will be representing more than one work based team or department. Ideally they should have worked in the teams or the departments they represent and have had hands on experience of the processes within those teams and departments. This task centric competence usually establishes the project team member’s legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of the teams and departments they represent.
Ability to Participate
Project team members should have the ability to participate in the project
team proceedings which means that they will be able to commit a substantial
amount of their working time 80% or even be full time on the project.
Avoid Managers
Managers have a day job and they are judged by the results of their
efforts toward the goals of their day job. Experience suggest that managers do
not make good project team members because they angst about the day job and are
constantly being pulled back to it. It is better to appoint the managers first
lieutenant or right hand person to the project team. This has a number of
advantages:
They don’t have the same conflict between the day job
and the project.
They are
usually hands on and know the processes well.
They don’t
usually ‘own’ the existing processes so are more open to challenging them
They are keen
to learn and develop their careers
The project is
great way to train the next generation of managers
The following article and book gives other insights into building project teams:
Nobody’s Perfect but a team can be, Antony Jay Observer Magazine, 20th April 1980, 8 pages:
Management Teams: Why they succeed or fail, R Meredith Belbin, Butterworth- Heinemann, London, 1996, 192 pages, ISBN-10: 0750626763, ISBN-13: 978-0750626767
Happy Implementing!
