Project Team Selection

How big should your project team be? Too small it won’t be big enough to share the burden or represent all the constituencies or disciplines of the business. Too big it will be difficult to organise and manage. Also individual ownership, engagement, commitment will be too diffuse. Of course it also depends on the size of project. Is the deployment thirty sites, with 5000 users over 6 continents or a single site implementation with just a few users?

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

My recommendation to avoid managers doesn’t mean the managers are not involved in the project, they are but at a strategic level as business decision makers, more of this in a later….

The following article and book gives other insights into building project teams:
Nobody’s Perfect but a team can be, Antony Jay Observer Magazine, 20^th 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!