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Team Solving: The Under-Utilized Power
Mike Griffiths is an experienced project manager, author and consultant who works for PMI as a subject matter expert. Before joining PMI, Mike consulted and managed innovation and technology projects throughout Europe, North and South America for 30+ years. He was co-lead for the PMBOK Guide—Seventh Edition, lead for the Agile Practice Guide, and contributor to the PMI-ACP and PMP exam content outlines. Outside of PMI, Mike maintains the websites www.LeadingAnswers.com about leading teams and www.PMillustrated.com, which teaches project management for visual learners.
First the bad news: All projects face problems. Now the good news: Your team members have the best solutions.
Projects rarely go exactly to plan; they have a nasty habit of uncovering gnarly problems that were not anticipated, but need to be solved. This is illustrated nicely by Doug DeCarlo in his book Extreme Project Management.
The top black line depicts the planned approach moving in orderly fashion from start to finish. The lower blue line depicts how projects really progress with sidetracks and setbacks as obstacles are encountered and overcome.
Yet in attempting to solve these problems, project managers too often overlook the best source of solutions--the project team. This article outlines why the team has the best practical solutions even when they may not be the best theoretical solutions.
While managing a government project during an IT vendor change, we needed to quickly build rapport with the business users of the system and subject matter experts in order to maintain the development pace from the previous team. The problem we faced was, how do we get to know the business folks better and connect the team members and SMEs? Rather than contriving some project social event and trying to get buy-in from the business and team, I presented the problem to the team in a planning meeting.
After some back and forth, a team member suggested that since quite a few …
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