Working with People: The Secret Sauce for Project Success

Michael R. Wood is a Business Process Improvement & IT Strategist Independent Consultant. He is creator of the business process-improvement methodology called HELIX and founder of The Natural Intelligence Group, a strategy, process improvement and technology consulting company. He is also a CPA, has served as an Adjunct Professor in Pepperdine's Management MBA program, an Associate Professor at California Lutheran University, and on the boards of numerous professional organizations. Mr. Wood is a sought after presenter of HELIX workshops and seminars in both the U.S. and Europe.

  Resource Management  

Believe it or not, successful project management is more about getting people to work together to achieve a specific outcome than it is about tools and frameworks. People are the secret sauce for project success.

Getting people to work together goes well beyond the formal project team and can require cooperation across the entire spectrum of the organization. Truly, perhaps the greatest challenge for any project manager is managing the human resources needed to achieve the outcomes they have been charged to deliver.

Most projects come with some realities that project managers need to understand if success is to be theirs. Here are some critical ones you might find worth pondering.

1. Project teams are usually assigned, not chosen. For the majority of organizations, especially mid-size and smaller, the choices surrounding the members of the project team are limited. Often, the project manager has a team assigned to the project and they have little influence over who these people are. The team members may not have any experience working with each other, and thus it is up to the project manager to foster and build team chemistry and unity (something usually not factored into the project timeline or budget).

Sometimes team members hit it off right away, but usually it can take weeks for a team to find its rhythm and cadence. Knowing how to accelerate this process …

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