Rules to Work By

  ProjectsAtWork  

10 guiding principles of project team behavior.

How's your team's teamwork? If there is room for improvement, consider doing what a group at CH2M HILL Hanford Group did. It established guiding principles of project team behavior, calling them the "10 Team Commandments."

Vice president of projects Rick Raymond says his team decided early on that determining how the team would function was as important as untangling elements of its complex project to fix a nuclear waste storage tank. So team members researched characteristics of good teams and drew from past experiences, then distilled their ideas into a list of 10 commandments.

"It created an understanding about what it meant to be a team and set a foundation for how we were going to behave with each other," says the Richland, Wash.-based project manager. And that was especially important since 15 different companies and 353 individuals worked on the project.

Throughout the project (which was completed ahead of schedule and under budget), people used the principles to praise or gently redirect the behavior of fellow team members. Raymond says the commandments, which were in the project charter and posted in the project office, made managing people issues easier.

Raymond recommends other teams take the …

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