No-Drama PM: Team

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Communications Management   Leadership   ProjectsAtWork  

The more you specify exactly what your team must do and how it must do it, the less team members will seek to understand the thinking behind what they’re doing. High-performing teams start with a firm grasp of the goals of the project — the "why" — and then actively participate in achieving its success.

This is the third in a series of excerpts from “No-Drama Project Management”  — a new book that explores the preventable problems that cause project failures and how to steer clear of them.

Most project management literature says that the project team is responsible for doing the stuff that the project manager tells them to do. This is, at best, an oversimplification of the role of your project team. Certainly you hope that the members of the team faithfully execute the tasks you put before them; but if that is all they do, then you probably aren’t getting as much value from them as you should. And at least some of the time, this is your own fault.

Yes, as project manager, your job is to fully specify individual tasks that can then be assigned to individual project members for delivery. String enough of these together, and you wind up with a project, a deliverable, or even a product you can bring to market. But there is a major weakness in this kind of thinking.

The more you fully specify exactly what you want and exactly how you…

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