What Am I Supposed to Do on This Team, Anyway?

As new projects get kicked off, project managers and functional managers alike agree that representatives from the involved functional areas need to participate on the project team. What is missing is an understanding of what all these functional representatives are supposed to do—or more appropriately, a consistent understanding of what they're supposed to do.

There are usually a few core groups and several support groups involved in projects. Core team members are likely to allocate 100 percent of their time to the project, while support team members may be only 10 percent allocated. This dynamic of teams composed of members with varying time commitments is critical to understand and can affect PM agility.

For dedicated team members, it is generally clear what their role is on the team. It is likely related to development or implementation, and they are accustomed to project work. These team members are looked to as leaders on the team and also tend to have more of a vested interest in the project's success, given their time and dedication to it. The danger to team agility comes when these dedicated members try to create excessive focus on their specific area of interest, giving it a false level of importance in the overall project and thus overshadowing other important areas. You can legitimately argue that it is your role to be a champion for your functional area; however, it should not be at the expense of other team members. The core team members need to learn to balance their influence on other team members between support of their individual/functional efforts and support of team agility.

It is very easy for an influential team member to fall into the trap of giving orders to other team members (who are perhaps looking for direction, anyway) on tasks that support his particular area alone. While this may indeed advance the core of the project, it potentially can have a negative effect on overall project agility if, for instance, a 20 percent allocated team member spends his limited time supporting the core member instead of his own area. It would be much more beneficial to the overall team effort and dynamics for the core team member to spend a small percentage of his time helping other support team members to get engaged, so they can better contribute to the project.

We will take a closer look at the roles of team members on the agile project later in Chapter 6, which covers the project team.

Agile Strategy

Get your whole team engaged in the project by encouraging the core team members to support the support team members.