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Creating a TeamCreating a TeamYou can’t approach creating a team the way you would baking a cake or completing a paint-by-the-numbers picture. As you will be dealing with multiple individuals, you’ll discover their personalities, their ambitions, and their motivations. Being a project manager is as much about being a leader as it is managing tasks, deadlines, and resources. You will, through experience, learn how to recognize the leaders within the team. You’ll have to look for the members who are willing to go the extra mile, who do what it takes to do a job right, and who are willing to help others excel. These attributes signal the type of members you want on your team. The easiest way to create teams with this type of worker? Set the example yourself. Imagine yourself as a team member on your project. How would you like the project manager to act? Or call upon your own experience: what have previous project managers taught you by their actions? By setting the example of how your team should work, you’re following ageless advice: leading by doing. Defining Project Manager PowerProject managers have responsibility. And with that responsibility comes power. When it comes to the project team you are seen as someone with some degree of power. Get used to it, but don’t let it go to your head. While the project manager must have a degree of power to get the project work done, the extent of your power is also likely relevant to the organizational structure you’re working in. For example, recall that a functional organization gives the power to the functional manager and the project manager may be known as just a project coordinator. A project manager does, however, wield a certain amount of power in most organizations. The project team can see this power, correctly or incorrectly, based on their relationship with you. Their perception of your power—and how you use your project management powers—will influence the project team and how they accomplish their project work. The five types of project manager powers are
Hello! My Name Is…If your team works together on a regular basis, then chances are the team has already established camaraderie. The spirit of teamwork is not something that can be born overnight—or even in a matter of days. Camaraderie is created from experiences of the teammates. A successful installation of software, or even a failed one, creates a sense of unity among the team. It’s mandatory on just about any project that team members work together. Here’s where things get tricky. Among those team members, you’ve got ambition, jealousies, secret agendas, uncertainties, and anxiety pooling in and seeping through the workers of your project. One of your first goals will be to establish some order in the team and change the members’ focus to the end result of the project. Figure 6-3 illustrates the detrimental effect personal ambitions have on the success of a project. By motivating your team to focus on the project deliverables, you can, like a magician, misdirect their attention from their own agendas to the project’s success. You can spark the creation of a true team by demonstrating how the members are all in this together. How can you do this? How can you motivate your team and change the focus from self-centric to project-centric? Here are some methods:
Where Do You Live?In today’s world, it’s typical of a single project to span the globe. No doubt it’s difficult for team members to feel like they are part of the same team when they’re in London and their counterpart is in Phoenix. Ideally, collocated teams communicate better, work together better, and have a sense of ownership. Reality, however, proves that noncollocated teams exist in many organizations, and the project manager must take extra measures to ensure the project succeeds, regardless of the geographical boundaries. When dealing with noncollocated teams, your team will likely be built around subteams. A subteam is simply a squadron of team members unique to one task within the project or within each geographical area. For example, as depicted in Figure 6-4, a company is implementing Oracle servers throughout its enterprise. The company has 12 locations throughout the world. Some of the same tasks that need to be accomplished in Madison, Wisconsin, will also need to be performed in Paris, France. Rather than having one team consisting of six members fly around the globe, the project manager implements 12 subteams. In this example, each subteam has six members. Of the six members, one is the team leader for that location. All of the team leaders report to the project manager, the 73rd member of the team. The team members in each location report to their immediate team leader. Implementation of the Oracle servers at each location will follow a standard procedure for the installation and configuration. The path to success should be the same at each location regardless of geography. Certainly not all projects will map out this smoothly. Some sites may not have the technical know-how of others, and travel will be required. In other instances, some sites will require more configuration than others, or an increase in security, and other variances. The lesson to be learned is that when teams are dispersed, a chain of command must be established to create uniformity and smooth implementation. The phrase “out of sight, out of mind” often proves true when dealing with dispersed project teams. Finally, when working with multiple subteams, communication is paramount. Team leaders and the project manager should have regularly scheduled meetings either in person or through teleconferences or videoconferences. In addition, team leaders should have the ability to contact other team members around the globe. In some instances, team members from different teams will need to work together as well. For example, the communication between two servers has to be configured. The teammates responsible for this step of the configuration will need to coordinate their configurations and installation with the teammates who have identical responsibilities in other locations. Building RelationshipsWhen an individual joins your team, you and the individual have a relationship: project manager to team member. Immediately the team member knows his role in the project as a team member, and you know your role in relation to the team member as the project manager. What may not be known, however, is the relationships between team members. You may need to give some introduction of each team member and explain why that person is on the team and what responsibilities that person has. Don’t let your team members just figure things out for themselves. In a large project, it would be ideal to have a directory of the team members, their contact information, and their arsenal of talents made available to the whole team. On all projects, your team will have to work together very quickly. It’s not a bad idea to bring the team together in some type of activity away from the workplace. Examples of team building exercises:
Team Building Exercises WorkDon’t discount out-of-the-office team-building exercises. Professional team building exercises are available around the globe:
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