Teamwork Starts With Planning

Vincent is a Senior Project Management Consultant and e-Learning Developer.

  Communications Management   Talent Management   Teams   Work Breakdown Structures (WBS)   ProjectsAtWork  

In planning your projects, team members should provide much of the input and begin to define and understand their roles and responsibilities. Then, during execution, they can better focus on developing the end product as they work together, mutally accountable, with common purpose and clear performance goals.

A project manager’s job would be so much easier if projects didn’t involve people! Too often the project manager is expected to take a dysfunctional team and produce an outstanding product in record time. Like making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear! That’s one way to put it. Another way is: A project manager can only succeed if the project team succeeds.

People are a key element of your project — they do the work, they bring success. While some people may be pre-assigned to your project, many are signed on based on project needs. These needs are typically identified when you start defining the deliverables in your WBS, where you should consider such things as What skills are required? … What skill levels are required? … Who can do the work?

Be realistic. It might be nice to have mostly senior resources on your project, but they are usually in high demand. So you need to identify those areas where you absolutely have to have lots of experience, and identify the impact to the project if you don’t get these people…

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