Teaching PM Basics to Non-PM Staff

Stephanie is a project process specialist, trainer and mentor. She is the Lead Consultant at Jaeger Consultants Ltd in Nairobi. Stephanie specializes in the human aspect of project management and leadership, and encourages discussion and feedback. She also writes regular blogs on jaeger-consultants.com.

  Communications Management   Leadership   New Practitioners   Teams  

During my project management career, I often found that internal project team members had little or no knowledge about what a project is or why project management processes are important. The role of the project manager was totally misunderstood. The worst was that the different teams/departments did not understand the importance of their own role within a project. Hence, I realized that sensitizing them is very important—and I have spent extensive time with the different teams and departments to ensure they understood the basics.

Internal misconceptions and lack of teamwork often hamper project delivery and slow everything down. People are disgruntled and have not bought into the project, especially if it's outside their routine work. This severely hampers your project delivery. Spending a little extra time sensitizing the team members and getting their buy-in can help your project delivery tremendously. I have talked about getting buy-in in a different article. Here, I will talk about the second aspect.

If your team members understand the following four things, they will work together much better:

• What is a project as opposed to normal operations?
• What does a project manager do?
• What are the internal project management processes?
• What is the role of the department/team within the project management processes? Why are they important?

The …

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