Leverage the team (revised)
By Raymond Posch

It is often tempting to a project manager, especially if he or she is also a subject matter expert in the type of project to be performed, to do too much planning independently and to make too many independent decisions.

By independently, I mean without the direct involvement of the team, and often with too little direct or indirect input from the project stakeholders. This tends to happen most often with a project manager who is fairly new to the project management role.

And, believe me, I have made the mistake of developing detailed plans without enough direct involvement of the team. Those plans always needed working and reworking because of my misunderstandings.

And then I saw a project where the project manager involved the whole team in the planning process. At first, I thought it was wasting team members’ time to involve them in the whole process. When I talked to her about it afterwards, however, she pointed out how there was a much better understanding of interdependencies as a result. And, as the project progressed, I saw evidence that the team was taking much more ownership and behaving as a cohesive team.

Experience teaches, that the project manager needs to use the power, creativity, and collective intelligence of the team. Now I am using team in the general sense here. Teams, by their nature, bring the diverse experience, knowledge, viewpoints, styles of thinking and interacting, and so on, of a group of people to the table. Teams, in their diversity, hold the potential for great creative energy on any project.

You have to take my word for this if you’ve never experienced the synergy and creativity of good cohesive teams. I have seen good cohesive teams be formed early in projects and then go on to not only perform well but to produce far better than normal results.

In the case of your specific project, hopefully the project team has been chosen wisely for their fit and potential contribution to the project. A well chosen team can bring even greater focus, synergy, commitment, knowledge of the context and the problem to be solved, experience with existing processes, and appropriate skills to the project. Therefore, you as the project manager should always insist on selecting the project team with this in mind.

The project manager should leverage the power of the team working together, collectively and collaboratively, throughout all phases of the project. It is tempting, especially when team members are part-time contributors on your project and otherwise busy on other projects, to restrict participation of team members to specific activities in which they are the key players. But that usually results in a less effective team because the individuals know less about what is going on in the project, and they are less able to provide insights about how the other parts of the project interrelate and potentially impact their part of the project.

Leverage the whole team as much as possible. When you do, you will be surprised by the creativity and smarts of the team working as a collective whole. The team should be involved as a whole in the requirements definition process, the planning process, and even the project execution and control - because the more shared knowledge the team has about the project, and the more synchronized it is about the progress and events within the project, the more effective and successful it will be in working towards the project’s real goals.

Remember that a team is a collection of unique individuals - people with unique skills and capabilities. The more you know about them individually, the more you can leverage strengths and minimize weaknesses. Never make the mistake of treating people as interchangeable resources, and never allow senior managers or others to make that mistake.

Leverage the power of the team. It is the single most important, and I would even say critical, factor in how successful the project will be - in whatever way that is measured. But make sure the team is clear about the goals and how success will be measured from early on.

Raymond Posch is publisher of Project Success Tips (formerly Weekly PM Insights) newsletter as well as being a full time project manager. See Ray's bio on our Meet the Experts page. He can be reached at ray@projectsuccesstips.com.

Filed under Teamwork & Team Building