Project Team

5 Key excerpts on "Project Team"

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  eBook - ePub

  Project Management Leadership

  Building Creative Teams

  • Rory Burke, Steve Barron(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  A Project Team can be defined as a number of people who work closely together to achieve shared common goals. Through interaction and collaboration the team strives to enhance its creativity, innovation, problem solving, decision making, support and work performance.

  From the definitions, a team implies a number of people working together to achieve results, while a group of people (in project management speak) implies a collection of individuals who, although they might be working on the same project, do not necessarily interact with each other (see Figure 12.1 ). This is often the case when the project manager coordinates the project with the people individually. Under such conditions, unity of project purpose is a myth.

  Figure 12.1 : Project Team Arrangements

  1. Project Teams vs. Project Lifecycle

  The project lifecycle can be used to subdivide the Project Teams by project phase. This is a logical approach because, by definition, each phase produces a different set of deliverables and, therefore, requires a different team membership with a different set of skills. Consider the teams outlined in Figure 12.2 .

  Figure 12.2 : Project Teams vs. Project Lifecycle

  Although Figure 12.2 implies there could be different team membership for each phase, in practice, the teams need to be interlinked for consistency and understanding and alignment with the company vision, requirements and business case.

  The project lifecycle shows the relative position of the teams within each phase, and how their scope of work and objectives within each phase are interlinked by a common thread to produce the phase deliverables and, ultimately, to implement corporate strategy and achieve the corporate long-term objectives. The Project Team analysis identifies the different teams so that their requirements can be influenced, aligned and managed.

  2. Why Companies Use Project Teams

  Project Teams offer companies an efficient and effective way of managing multi-disciplined projects in a competitive environment. Consider the needs and benefits of working in Project Teams shown in Table 12.1

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  eBook - ePub

  Projects Without Boundaries

  Successfully Leading Teams and Managing Projects in a Virtual World

  • Russ J. Martinelli, James M. Waddell, Tim J. Rahschulte(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  3

  How effective a Project Team is depends on how well members work together in creating the work product and achieving the project objectives. This is commonly known as teamwork. A good working definition of teamwork is “the process of working collaboratively with a group of people in order to achieve a common goal.”4

  Good teamwork is rooted by a set of shared values that enables important behaviors including listening and constructively responding to the points of view of other team members, providing support to each other on the team, and being positive and supportive to the accomplishments of others on the team.5 Teamwork is further encouraged and achieved during the life of the project through good communication and collaboration practices, mutual respect, appropriate processes, and clarity in decision making procedures.

  Not all Project Teams are created equal. All projects consist of a team of people who perform the work intended. Some Project Teams seem to consistently perform at a higher level than others. A high-performance team is one that consistently exceeds the expectations of customers, sponsors, and senior management. Normally, what comes to mind when most of us think of high-performance teams is a sense of accomplishment that goes beyond expectations. Jon Katzenbach, a leading author and practitioner in organizational strategies, accurately describes a high-performance team as “a group that meets all the conditions of real teams, and has members who are also deeply committed to each other's personal growth and success. That commitment usually transcends the team and the team has internalized the philosophy that if one of us fails, we all fail.”6

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  STEP Project Management

  Guide for Science, Technology, and Engineering Projects

  • Adedeji B. Badiru(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  PROJECT DEFINITIONS Project : A project is traditionally defined as a unique one-of-kind endeavor with a specific goal that has a definite beginning and a definite end. PMBOK defines a proj-ect as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service, or result. Temporary means having a defined beginning and a definite end. The term “unique” implies that the project is different from other projects in terms of characteristics. Project management : This author defines project management (PM) as the process of managing, allocating, and timing resources to achieve a given goal in an efficient and expeditious manner. PMBOK defines PM as the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and tech-niques to project activities to achieve project objectives. Other sources define PM as the collection of skills, tools, and management processes essential for executing a project successfully. Project management methodology : A project management methodology (PMM) defines a process that a Project Team uses in executing a project from planning through phase out. Science Technology Engineering People Process Infrastructure Brick and Mortar Energy Organization Structure Leadership Culture Transformation Transportation Materials integrity Safety Security Recruitment Education Training Development Retention Advancement Workforce right-sizing Business process Process improvement Lean Six Sigma Systems thinking Asset management Capacity utilization IT Data Research Development Prototyping Sustainability Science, technology, engineering FIGURE 1.3 Framework for cross-functional application of project management. Science, Technology, and Engineering Project Methodology 13 Project management information system : A project management information sys-tem (PMIS) refers to an automated system or computer software used by the PM team as a tool for the execution of the activities contained in the PM plan.

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  Engineering Practice in a Global Context

  Understanding the Technical and the Social

  • Bill Williams, José Figueiredo, James Trevelyan(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Team practices that make best use of those resources focus on how design tasks are divided, how team interdependence is built, and how ideas are shared and weighed. Much has been written over the past decade about the need for engineers who have the ability to work competently in design teams, to share ideas, and to consider a wide range of issues in the process of designing. Certainly, society needs engineers to develop the ability to communicate well, to understand design processes, and to respect a full range of contextual issues, however, it is well accepted in the field that competent design teams can produce better results than do individual engineers. The creative synergy that takes place when the right mix of team members share and consider each other’s ideas is valued by industry and drives important educational efforts, such as the problem-and project-based capstone coursework that often culminates an engineering undergraduate degree. Those courses frequently present novice engineers with their first experience of the complexity of engineering design. The interaction of design process tasks and group development tasks is an increas-ingly important area of concern in engineering. The development of clear, timely, and 80 Jim Borgford-Parnell, Katherine Deibel & Cynthia J. Atman focused dialogue underlies effective collaboration on design teams. This places social processes in a foundational role in a team design process. Obviously this is not a recent revelation. However, it does pose an on-going challenge for engineering educators who are endeavouring to instill in their students a broad conceptual understanding of the myriad pieces and workings that constitute team design. As was made evident by Waite et al. from their study of student group work in computer science, if we are to help our students gain an ability to collaborate we will first have to overcome their strong bias against collaboration (Waite et al. , 2004).

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  The Making of an Expert Engineer

  • James Trevelyan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  Often, that involves original designs using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components and materials, and it nearly always includes reusing a substan-tial amount of material and ideas from previous designs. Engineers collaborate with each other to find the most economic ways to do this, gathering information from a network of peers, suppliers, end users, and other relevant individuals. Engineers pre-dict the performance of products and systems, along with organising and coordinating technical work performed by other people in order to deliver results, both informally and by using extensive project management systems and techniques. In Chapter 5, we saw how engineers rely on an extended network of people, particularly other engineers, to access much of the special expertise they need to do all this. Sixty percent or more of their time is spent interacting with other engineers, clients, supervisors, specialists, technicians, drafters, technologists, and many other people who have special knowledge, experience, and understanding. They interact face-to-face, on the phone, via e-mail, by writing and reading documents, and working with information systems. The core technical ‘stuff’ that defines engineering is distributed unevenly in the minds of all the people who contribute. No one knows it all or can 190 The making of an expert engineer do it all. In other words, collaboration with other people forms the greater part of an engineer’s work. Engineering is, above all, a productive activity: something real and valuable happens as a result of engineering. 1 This activity requires a collaborative effort by people in an engineering enterprise. In other words, an engineering enterprise only works because people work together and collaborate effectively. The quality of the activity depends on the quality of social interactions between the people in the enter-prise to ensure that technical ideas, concepts, and details are accurately exchanged.

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