Who's On My Team?

Kenneth has 14 years of healthcare experience in government and private industry. Over eight years of experience managing healthcare IT projects, operations, contracts, and personnel. His work experience includes project management, contracts and procurements, data analysis, claims adjudication, business writing, and business process modeling. Kenneth was certified in 2006 as a Project Management Professional.

  Talent Management  

A project involves many people working together. There are stakeholders, decision makers, project managers and resources engaged in the tasks, and administrators and lots of others who need to carry off the carefully orchestrated project plan that was laid out at the beginning.

You often begin the project with a great feeling that everyone is on the same team working together. As the project progresses though, you may discover that not everyone is on the same team; you may in fact find out that only a few people are on “your” team, while others are another team (or even multiple teams).

The Ultimate Goal
When people start working on different teams within a project, one or more teams may end up not working toward the ultimate goal of the project, whatever the end result may be. As time marches forward, someone may even forget what the goal of the project truly is; this is especially true in very large multi-year projects.

As the project manager, it’s your job to keep that goal front and center in communications. You may not be able to stop people from floating around to different teams; it is part of human nature. But you can do your best to remind everyone of why they are working on the project. If that goal of the project doesn’t succeed, then none of the teams will either.

Finding Cross Purposes
People drift to different teams because …

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