In The Beginning, The Project Team

Posted by Rich Crowley in Project Management, teams

One aspect of project management that I really enjoy is my involvement in the creation and putting into motion of the core project team. By creation, I don’t mean working with resource managers and senior stakeholders to simply identify the key people the project will require and assigning roles in some document. While that is important, that is a prior step. No, when I say “the creation and putting into motion of the core project team” I am referring to the initial steps required to pull the team together, either physically whenever possible, or via video or audio conference where people are distributed, to define the project mission and establish how we should make our initial steps of progress on the project. The entire project doesn’t have to be figured out in these first few meetings, but it is important and gratifying to identify where some initial progress can be made quickly.

The reason I like this aspect of any project is that every team has its own unique blend of people and chemistry. Assessing these people elements at both an individual level and a group level, is what requires good soft-skills in a project manager. It requires one to identify those team members with domain knowledge and those without, to see who has capacity to actually contribute and who are maxed out on other work, to think about which combinations of people will produce results that outweigh the sums of their individual contributions, what teams / departments / divisions etc. are represented and which are missing and what the individual work styles are of the project team members, etc. It is also requires one to look for the “snakes in the grass” in the form of people who simply don’t get along, frustrations the team members have about the project, teams / departments / divisions that have overlapping (and different) ideas about how the project should proceed etc.

One of my goals during this stage of pulling the core team together is to establish early momentum. Perhaps it’s a simple as defining a few activities that can proceed right away and who will run with these. It may be that the team has some questions that need to be answered by more senior project stakeholders before anything can be done. If that’s the case, that’s fine too as at least we know what’s impeding the core team from getting started with some actual work. There are many positive metaphors for these early days in the life of a project – the blank canvas staring at the painter, the raw materials having just been delivered to a building site, the sports team that has just been defined after a series of tryouts and cuts.

Too often the industry refers to people as resources which tends to make them a little more two-dimensional than they should be from a project governance perspective. I’m as guilty as the next person in this regard. However, a PM colleague of mine once stated the obvious when he said “projects are all about people”. If you don’t like the machinations of working with a group of people in the early days of a project, you’re missing out on one of the truly fun aspects of the PM role.