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A Working Relationship
Aaron is the former editor of ProjectsAtWork.com
Team/Project Acculitics uses Social Network Analysis to bring much-needed objectivity to the team-building process.
"The best-laid plans of mice and men go oft astray." But for off-course projects, the cause is just as likely to be a disconnected team as a poorly conceived plan. That said, there is a strong tendency for project managers to focus on the plan — the numbers — and leave the ethereal stuff of team chemistry to fate or hope or even worse.
The field of Social Network Analysis (SNA) — a discipline that has spawned a professional association, graduate programs and dozens of related software programs — has a lot of non-ethereal stuff to impart about the way people interact, and so it makes sense that the project management community would apply SNA to the eternal challenge of building effective teams.
Project consulting firm CompanySmith has recently launched Team/Project Acculitics (sm), a tactical, data-driven process — not software — for improving the performance and predictability of project teams. "Project planning has become quite a mature science, yet team building is still more of an art form. But projects require both plans and effective teams, and TPA makes that linkage," says Dennis Smith, principal of CompanySmith.
Smith says TPA is a cost effective, time efficient alternative to traditional team building techniques, which can take team members …
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Half this game is ninety percent mental. - Yogi Berra |