Team Development

Managing a project team differs from managing a functional work group. Project teams are temporary, and getting everyone to work together on a common goal can be a challenge, especially if your team members are specialists in a given discipline without a lot of broad business background. As project manager, you must mold this group into an efficient team that can work together to deliver the project as defined on time, within budget, and with quality. Not an easy undertaking, especially if you factor in a combination of full- and part-time team members , technical and nontechnical people, and in some cases a team dispersed over a large geographic area.

As project manager you need to be concerned with building and managing a cohesive team, providing appropriate training to team members, and using an effective rewards and recognition system.

Building and Managing a Cohesive Team

Before we begin discussing techniques to manage a temporary team, it is helpful to look at the progressive stages that a team goes through. You may be familiar with this concept from a general management perspective, but it applies to project teams as well.

Forming The forming stage is where the team members go through the process of getting oriented to the project's objectives, the project manager, and each other.

Storming Storming is the struggle for control, power, and influence as the team members work to establish themselves in the project structure.

Norming As the project evolves and the team settles in to a routine, the norming stage brings cooperation and establishment of beneficial work practices.

Performing The last team stage is the performing stage that brings interdependence , cohesiveness, and high productivity.

It takes both time and good management to bring a team through these stages. A good starting point is a project kickoff.

Project Kickoff

If you think about past experiences you have had being involved in a new project, you can probably break down most of your concerns into these questions:

• Why am I here?

• Who are you and what do you expect of me?

• What are we doing?

• How will we do our work?

As project manager, you need to take the steps necessary to ensure that team members have answers to those questions. A good project kickoff meeting will do a lot to answer those questions and establish a foundation for your team members.

A project kickoff meeting is the best way to formally introduce team members and other stakeholders and convey the same message to everyone at the same time. Typically, you may not know all of your team members, and you may not even have had the opportunity to interview them for the positions they will fill. Not the best way to start a relationship, but in some organizations team members are provided by the functional manager with little input from the project manager.

The tone that you set at the project kickoff meeting can make or break your relationship with the team. An ideal project kickoff session is a combination of serious business and fun. Your goal is to get the team aligned around the project goals and to get the team members comfortable with each other. This is a great opportunity to begin the forming stage.

You may know project managers who dislike the idea of a project kickoff and consider it a waste of time and money, but experience proves that the results of a good kickoff meeting make it well worth the effort. There are a lot of different ways to structure a kickoff meeting. Here are some of the key components you may choose to include.

Welcome

It is a good idea to start the meeting by welcoming the team members and letting them know that you are looking forward to working with them. The welcome also gives you an opportunity to set the stage for the rest of the day. Take a few minutes to run through what participants can expect out of the meeting and what activities they will be involved in.

Introductions

A typical introduction format may include the person's functional area, brief background, and role in the project. The project manager should start the process to set an example of the appropriate length and detail. Put some thought into the information you want team members to share so that the time invested is worthwhile.

Guest Speakers

Invite the sponsor, the client, and any other executive stakeholders; it is important that the team members know them and hear first-hand their goals for the project. These people may not be able to stay for the whole session, but do your best to get them to at least make an appearance and say a few words to the team.

You may need to do some coaching here, so spend time prior to the session to communicate with the executive stakeholders regarding the message they will deliver. The client is often the best candidate to provide the business justification for the project and the link to the corporate strategy. If your client or sponsor is a dynamic speaker, you might want to schedule them for a little more time to get the troops excited about the project they are working on.

Project Overview

Covering the project scope statement is key to starting the team on the right track. A summary of the key deliverables from each of the project phases, as well as the high-level schedule and budget will help team members get the big picture and understand how they fit. The kickoff meeting is an excellent opportunity to get everyone on the same page, especially as project team members typically do not come on board at the same time. At the time you start project execution, you will probably have a combination of people who have been involved with the project since initiation and those who are relatively new to the project.

Project Manager Expectations

This is your chance to communicate how you will be managing the project and your expectations for how the team will function. Many of the team members may not know you or be familiar your management style.

This is not the place for a detailed review of a progress report template or a team meeting agenda, but is it important for the team to know whether you plan weekly team meetings, what you expect in terms of progress reports, and how they will be asked to provide input into project progress reports .

Question and Answer

One of the most important items of the kickoff session is the time you allocate for team members to ask questions. Ideally, this is a panel session so that questions can be directed to the project manager, the sponsor, the client, or other executive stakeholders, but it is just as important even if the questions are only directed to the project manager.

Real-World Scenario: Kickoff for Remote Team Members

For a project kickoff to work, it needs to include all the team members. But what do you do if part of your team is located in a different city or state?

Remote team members often feel left out, especially if the majority of the team, including the project manager, sponsor, and client is located at corporate headquarters where all of the action is.

Getting approval to bring in remote team members is a battle worth fighting, because it is so important to making everyone feel like a part of the team. If you exclude your remote team members, you are sending them a message that they are less important before the project work is even underway.

With more companies looking closely at travel related expenses, bringing in remote team members may require prior approval of the sponsor, even if the budget will cover the expense. When making your case with the project sponsor, make sure you explain the importance of this meeting and the benefits to the project. Your sponsor will be much more receptive to the idea if he or she knows what will be covered and can see that this is far more than people getting together for a free lunch .

But what if you cannot get this to happen? It doesn't mean that there is not still a way to include them.

I was on a project where we had a large group of team members in a remote state. The company was really cutting back on travel, and even though the sponsor wanted to bring everyone to the same city, he could not get approval from the CEO. But we were able to get approval for the next best thing: the sponsor, the client, and the project manager traveled to the remote city and held a separate kick-off for those people. It took extra time to do this, but this project was critical to the corporate strategy. We were able to use that day to build a sold foundation for dealing with the challenges of remote management.

 

Not only is this an opportunity to clarify any misunderstanding regarding the project, it is also a chance to do rumor control. Having everyone hear the same message from the same person at the same time can remove a lot of confusion.

Social Interaction

Another goal of a project kickoff meeting is to get the team members to start feeling comfortable with each other, so it is a good idea to plan activities that require interaction. A proven method to move a team forward is the ability to get team members to self disclose. When they get to this point they will tell you what is going right and wrong on your project. Social interaction will help get them to self disclosure.

This can be a tricky area to maneuver, as people have different interests and different tolerances for games and icebreakers. You can plan a scavenger hunt, a trivia game, or even a crossword puzzle based on key elements in the project plan. The point is to break the team into smaller groups and get people to start interacting with each other. This will also give you some insight into the various personalities and styles that you will be dealing with.

Monitoring Team Performance

As the leader of the project team, your role involves teaching the members of the team to take responsibility for task and relationship processes and outcomes . Through monitoring performance you should assure responsibility and accountability. To build and maintain the trust of your project team members you need to demonstrate competence, respect, honesty, integrity, and openness. You must also demonstrate that you are willing to act if there are performance problems.

Performance Feedback

Managing team member performance can be a complex undertaking. A successful project manager needs to let the people do the work they were assigned without approving every action taken. This may be a new concept for team members who are used to being micromanaged by a functional manager, or even to you as project managers. Team member performance will be enhanced if activities can be modified to fit individual needs. As long as the end result is the same and there is no impact on scope, schedule, budget, or quality, team members should be given freedom and choices in how to complete their tasks .

Although you should not micromanage team members, they do need feedback on how they are doing-good, bad, or otherwise . Most team members perform well in some areas and need improvement in others. Even if your organization structure does not require project managers to conduct formal written appraisals , you need to take care not to get so caught up in managing the project issues that you neglect to provide performance feedback. The following are important areas of focus as you prepare to discuss performance with a team member:

• Specify performance expectations.

• Identify inadequate performance behaviors.

• Reward superior performance.

• Reprimand inadequate performance.

• Provide specific consequences for choices made.

Performance feedback should be given in a timely fashion. It is of little value to attempt corrective action on something that happened several weeks ago. The team member may not even remember the specifics of the performance in question.

Rewards for superior performance can be given publicly , but a discussion of inadequate performance should always be done privately. Berating a team member in front of others is totally inappropriate and will likely make the person angry and defensive.

We are going to take a closer look at team management scenarios that involve conflict. Before we get into a discussion of the more challenging aspects of project team management, let's take a quick look at some styles that people use to deal with conflict:

Accommodating A person using an accommodating style attempts to meet the other person's needs at the expense of their own concerns.

Avoiding Avoiding finds the person 'dropping out' of the conflict situation; they choose to not bring the issue to the other person's attention and to not deal with the problem.

Competing A person who uses a competing style uses any actions available to satisfy his or her own needs, often at the other person's expense.

Compromising A compromising style attempts to resolve the conflict by partially satisfying the needs of both parties by having each give up something in order to reach an agreement.

Collaborating In the collaborating style, a person works with the other party to explore alternate solutions and agree on a solution that will satisfy each of their needs and concerns.

These conflict management styles can help you understand behavior you observe and must deal with when you need to correct team member behavior. Two situations that require special treatment are dealing with team member disputes and handling disgruntled team members, which we'll discuss next.

Team Member Disputes

Given the diverse backgrounds and varying areas of expertise you find in project team members, it should come as no surprise that team members will have disagreements . Sometimes people just need to have a conversation and work though the issues, but other times disputes require the intervention of the project manager.

You may be tempted to make a snap judgment based on what you see at any given point in time, but this may only exacerbate the situation. You need to get the facts and understand what is behind the dispute. If an experienced team member is trying to tell a more junior member how to do his or her work, this advice may have been unsolicited . If the junior member is completing activities according to plan, it does not matter if the approach is different than what the senior member uses. In a case like this, you may need to take the senior member aside and discuss the situation. You want to handle the situation carefully , as you do not want to alienate anyone , but you need to explain that each person is accountable for his or her own work. If the senior member has extra time, perhaps there is another person who wants and needs some guidance.

Team members may also disagree over the suitability of deliverables. Suggestions to make a deliverable better or more effective may be a sign of scope creep that can lead the project off track. You should establish and enforce a policy that any comments regarding the adequacy of a deliverable need to be stated in the context of the project scope and the project requirements. If a deliverable fails to meet the documented requirements, you have a valid issue, but if a person is just looking to add bells and whistles, you need to keep the project on track. These types of disputes can be eliminated if you define acceptance criteria for your deliverables in the planning phase. The project manager needs to act quickly to resolve these disagreements so that project time is not wasted .

Disgruntled Team Member

Few situations can poison team morale more quickly than a disgruntled team member. This can happen at any time during the project, and can involve anyone on the team.

The behavior of a discontented team member can take a variety of forms. A person may become argumentative in meetings or continually make side comments putting down the project. Even worse , this unhappy camper may spend time moving from cubicle to cubicle sharing these negative feelings about the project with other team members. When team members constantly hear statements that the project is stupid, doomed to fail, or on the cutting block, overall team productivity will be impacted.

As the project manager, you need to spend some private time with this employee to determine the cause of the dissatisfaction. It may be that the unhappy team member doesn't fully understand the project scope and how his or her contribution will lead to the project success, or at the other extreme, this could be an assignment the person did not want.

It is best to start by listening: stick to the facts and ask the person to clarify the negative comments. If the team member is repeating incorrect information, set the record straight. If he is frustrated about some aspect of the project and feels no one is listening, find out what the issue is and explain that going around bad-mouthing the project is not the way issues get resolved. If the person truly does not want to be a part of the project team or does not want to do her assigned tasks, work quickly with the functional manager or your sponsor to get this person replaced .

Developing your team and improving overall performance can also be accomplished through training.

Training

Depending on the nature of your project, another element of team development may be scheduling training for some or all of the project team members. In some companies, one of the perks associated with being assigned to do project work is the opportunity to expand a skill set or get information on new products or processes.

If you are developing a system using a new, evolving technology, the project may include sending the technical team to a class on the technology. A project manager for a new product team may provide training for the whole team on the product itself, including hands-on use of a prototype or assigning project team members to be a pilot group of users.

One of the more common types of training provided to project teams is project management training. Project management training can include a session developed by the project manager, formal training provided by an outside company, or training from an internal PMO on the standard methodologies, tools, and templates all project members are expected to use.

Team development and proper performance feedback are important, but another aspect of team development is rewards and recognition.

Rewards and Recognition

Some project managers (or maybe more frequently project sponsors) may tell you that project team members are just doing their job and should not be getting anything extra. But excellent performance is rewarded in most organizations, and project work should not be an exception.

Project teams work hard and often overcome numerous challenges to deliver a project. If your company has a functional organization structure, the project work may not receive the appropriate recognition from the functional managers. It is your job as project manager to recognize the job your team does and implement a reward system.

Real-World Scenario: Project Management 101

One of the more successful experiences we have had with project management training involved a project team in an organization that was just starting to implement the project management discipline. Based on the chaos that had been created on earlier attempts at running projects, it was clear that the team members needed a common understanding on what project management was all about.

We contracted with a professional project management training company to teach a beginner class in project management concepts. All project team members were required to attend this session.

All of the exercises associated with the class were based on the actual project the team members were assigned to. Not only did the team members gain knowledge of the project management discipline, they were able to contribute to the project while in class.

Although this took some time and money, it was well worth the effort. All team members used common definitions of terms, and it was much easier to talk about meeting requirements, the project baseline, scope creep, and other fundamental project management concepts. The success of this project resulted in the organization setting goals around various levels of project management training for the entire group.

 

A reward system is typically associated with money allocated in the project budget for the project manager to use for on-the-spot awards for outstanding performance or end-of-project merit awards. Depending on your organization's policies, rewards may be limited to merchandise or gift certificates.

If you are lucky enough to have money for a reward system, either as a direct budget line or as part of a managerial reserve, you must decide what constitutes performance worthy of receiving a reward. Anytime that you do provide an award, you should always state clearly what the person did that made you decide to make the award.

An alternate means of implementing a reward system is to reward the team as a whole, rather than individual performance. In this scenario, you are combining a reward system with ongoing team building. You can take the team to a sporting or cultural event after the completion of a particularly difficult phase. Team dinners or other celebrations to mark project completion are another popular choice. Team rewards are appropriate in situations where you have a cohesive, high-performing team with all members making a substantial contribution to the project success.

Not all project mangers have the resources to reward team members either individually or collectively, but that does not mean that superior performance should go unrecognized. One of the easiest things you can do is simply telling people that you are aware of what they have accomplished and that you appreciate their efforts.

A 'team member of the month' concept is a frequently used recognition technique. You can create a certificate or have a trophy that is passed on to the employee who has made the most significant contribution to the project for the previous month. With a program like this, you can solicit nominees from the team.

A letter of recognition to an employee's manager, with copies to the appropriate organizational executives and the project sponsor can be a very powerful means of communicating your appreciation for an outstanding performance.

The key to rewards and recognition is to establish a program to acknowledge the efforts of your project team members, whether it involves money, prizes, letters of commendation, or a simple 'thank you.' Whatever form your rewards and recognition program takes, you must make sure that it is applied consistently to all project team members. Inconsistent application of rewards is often construed as favoritism.

Your team is not the only group you interface with during project execution; you have ongoing relationships with all the stakeholders.