What Teams Need (But Won’t Ask)

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.

  Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

A project manager has many responsibilities to the team. Some (direction, communications) are more obvious than others (providing context, looking for training opportunities, maintaining a work-life harmony). Obvious or not, these activities are essential to developing high-performing teams that deliver successful projects.

Every good project manager knows that setting stakeholder expectations is one of the key tasks in ensuring a successful outcome. Continually setting and resetting the expectations of the customers, sponsors and owners of a project allow the team to triangulate on delivering exactly what is needed, at the time that people think it is going to be delivered. Mismatched beliefs about the goals or deliverables of a project is one of the sure ways to fail a project, no matter how hard you or the team works.

As part of this conversation, an experienced project manager will turn this into a two-way street. She will turn this into what the customer should anticipate being delivered, as well as what the project team will need from the customer or sponsor. This makes it clear to all that neither side can merely sit back and wait for the magic to happen; it will take active participation from all sides.

There is one more step to this process, though, and too often project managers miss it; that is making sure that the team gets to be part of the …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.