FC NOW: The Fast Company Weblog
April 20, 2004
We Are Our Projects
In a past issue of Fast Company, Tom Peters asserted that you are your projects. A more up-to-date tweak at that might be drawn from a recent Computerworld piece that outlines how to pick a project team.
While Kathleen Melymuka's perspective is understandably tech-centric, her advice and ideas can be applied in any industry or company:
- Fewer Is Better After the fifth member, a project team's effectiveness is inversely proportional to its mass.
- Attitude Counts People with a good work ethic who are upbeat, respectful of others and continually learning will help lift the team's spirit. Conversely, one cynic can spoil the entire team's outlook.
- Diversity Lowers Risk The riskier the project, the more diversity you need in the team. Desire for closure can lead [people] to focus on a strategy before considering the alternatives.
- Familiarity Breeds Action It's helpful if team members have worked together before.
- Availability Trumps Everything You need to identify what resources you will need and when.
- Leverage Matters One key to obtaining leverage is good relationships with other managers. Leverage can also come from an educated customer. If you can't get [the right people], alter or postpone the project until you can.
Posted by Heath Row at April 20, 2004 1:50 PM | Category: teamwork |
2 Comments
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it was my first project I worked on as a PM, and I have realised how important it is to adhere to the mentioned points.
But as a novice PM, I did get a team that was unskilled in the technology, but they have persevered albeit with resistance to my goadings to be able to deliver the work. An advantage that I had was the team size was just right, 5 people and all easy to talk to. Though technically I was a novice again, but then one can't expect to know all the skills at all times.
Though one of the members was an idealist and he expected everything to be delivered on the platter but he also is one of the thinking individual, the one who wants to do things right.
i found it rather difficult to deal with him 'cos of his non-communicative mode
Am still trying to figure out, at the fag end of the project, with 1 month of additional [but paid for] effort, how to deal with such people because the others were rather communicative to deal with.
I still am doing some soul searching as to why is it that 'I' am not able to communicate with this individual as much... Lotsa personal holes to plug I spose.
but then, the whole experience was a learning process with a lot of unanswered questions and more so, not sure what questions I need to ask either...
With about 10 years of overall experience I am still at a point where I think I got a lot of learning to do in terms of people management and communication and of course PM skills.
Great points! I think abother one to consider as well is this - pick a team of people who can get the job done - don't just pick a team of people by default simply because they are the subject matter experts. SMEs must be available to the team, and perhaps a key area should be on the team -- but I have seen way to many teams that are simply staffed by identifying all the right SMEs without regard to skills required to execute the project. It also makes it easy to justify why not to change some things if the team is too attached to the current situation the project is trying to change.