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Improve Your Project Management: Building a project management team

by Phil Baguley

Project teams are unusual. Unlike most of the other sorts of team that you’ll see in your organization, they are transient and short lived – they only exist for the duration of the project. Nevertheless, like other teams, they consist of people who provide a variety of specialist services to the team leader – the project manager. In order to do that – and do it effectively – they need to work together collaboratively and in ways that involve negotiated answers to conflict, decision taking and problem solving.
Achieving this isn’t easy. It involves making sure that your team has :

• a clear goal that’s accepted by all the team
• a specific and well-defined performance challenge
• the ability to develop consensus decisions and agreements
• the ability to work together participatively
• effective and efficient communication
• a clear definition of success (and failure).

Working like this doesn’t happen overnight. Your project team will need to grow through the four stages of team building called ‘forming’, ‘storming’, ‘norming’ and ‘performing’ – as you’ll see in the figure below.
[04_01NAW]

Four stages of team building: forming, storming, norming and performing.
Doing this is hard work, but it is worth doing. For when it works, it’ll give you a project team that’s capable of moving mountains.


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