Teamwork & Team Building

Articles for the Teamwork & Team Building category follow:

Building Empowered and Committed Teams 

By Raymond Posch

In business, work is done by individuals or by teams – either functional teams or project teams. Organizing and building effective teams is a core competency of business management; and where projects are concerned, it is a core competency of successful project management as well. In my opinion, project managers understand this critical successful factor much more clearly than most other business managers because the team is so crucial to project success.

In this article, I want to look at high performing teams and the role of empowerment… Only a few times in my career have I been involved with truly empowered teams, and it is amazing what they can accomplish.

High performance teams – teams that perform at very high levels – almost always have three critical characteristics (among others):

• The team is empowered to accomplish the goals of the project; 
• The team is truly committed to accomplishing the goals of the project; and 
• The team is the right team with the right skills for the project. 

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What Matters Most in Life also Matters in Projects
By Raymond Posch

The other day I came across a recap of one of the most enduring and fascinating research studies ever done on human behavior and the factors that matter in success and happiness. I have read reports on this study periodically over the last couple of decades as my interest in the subject has grown.

The study set about to analyze which factors matter most in whether a person is successful (by various measures), healthy, happy, and regards his life as well lived when he looks back in the later years of life.

The project was called the Grant Study, named after it's sponsor, W.T. Grant, the founder of a department store chain. For 72 years, the study at Harvard tracked the lives of 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s.

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Leverage the Team
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 be especially true for a project manager who is fairly new to the project management role.

Experience teaches, however, that the project manager needs to use the power, creativity, and collective intelligence of the team. ...

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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.

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Restarting a Project
By Raymond Posch

This is a story about having to stop a project gone wrong, examine the team dynamics and project approach that was not working, and then restart the project with a major replan of team organization, work effort, and timeline. (This story also has some useful lessons learned that are applicable to process improvement projects generally with a successful methodology.)

The Context

When I was the PMO manager of a dot.com startup, I was asked to lead a project to "achieve CMM level 3 in the shortest time possible". This was for a subsidiary of Perot Systems that was developing advanced ecommerce systems. It was during those exciting times of the dot.com boom.

The business reason for wanting to get to CMM Level 3 was that our best  competitors were advertising CMM Level 3 certification. Our management team thought that having the credential would allow us to prove ourselves more easily and compete in a highly competitive marketplace.

At the time we were still learning what worked and what didn't ...

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