It's the Team, Stupid (Part 1)

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

 

Is the best team always the right team to successfully deliver your project? If you could hand pick anyone in your company to work on your project, who would you pick? The most technically adept? The innovators and problem-solvers? Or perhaps you would simply select those colleagues with a proven track record of successfully delivering similar projects. In either case, very few of us get that opportunity.

According to a 2004 survey of Fortune 500 companies by project management consulting firm PCI Global, almost half of us (46 percent) acquire our project teams simply by taking whoever is offered to us, while a further 41 percent of project managers engage senior management and/or sponsor support to build their team. And a mere 6 percent fight to get the best people on their projects. At first glance it looks like this select group must have a significant advantage over the majority of us, that their projects should have a much higher success rate. But is that really the case?

Exercising control over the disparate elements that comprise a project is the very definition of successful project management. Effective control can only be applied if you have a comprehensive plan (time, budget, quality) so you know when and how project activities will be executed, and you have measures appropriate to those activities to tell you if, in fact, the …

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