Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Categories: resources
Phew, Project Resource Management has a lot of processes. We are over halfway now. I’m looking at What’s New In the PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition. Last month I took my third look at Project Resource Management (see here for Plan Resource Management, Estimate Activity Resources and Acquire Resources). Today, it’s the turn of the fourth process in this knowledge area: Develop Team.
This process name has changed from Develop Project Team.
Develop Team Process
This is the fourth process in the Knowledge Area. We’re still in the Executing process group.
This process is where you help your team gain the skills they need both to do their jobs on the project and also to become skilled at whatever it is that they would like to do to develop their career.
This is a bit of a strange one, because generally project managers don’t have a budget for staff training unless it specifically relates to something that is crucial for the project. However, we should all approach projects as learning opportunities.
Inputs
All the inputs have been updated.
Human resource management plan is replaced by project management plan.
Project staff assignments has gone, as has resource calendars. Additionally, we have:
Project documents: This appears again – it’s fast becoming the ‘go to’ answer for what is an input to a process when you don’t know what else to say. Resource calendars and project team assignments fit in here, along with things like the team charter and project schedule.
Enterprise environmental factors.
Organisational process assets.
Tools and Techniques
Goodbye team building activities and ground rules. These were my favourite things about developing people, but I confess to not actually having achieved them on many projects.
In PMBOK Guide®-- Sixth Edition, we have 8 tools and techniques for this process. Colocation, recognition and rewards, training (duh) stay the same.
New T&T are:
Virtual teams: I guess this is a technique? I can’t see how by virtue of having a virtual team you are developing individuals to improve their skills. Perhaps it’s to do with not having to train them in the first place – by using remote resources you can tap into a greater resource pool. I’m not sure about this one.
Communication technology: One of my favourite subjects! Watch my recent webinar on collaboration tools for project managers (yes, you get PDUs).
Meetings: Perhaps they were struggling a bit as to what to put in this knowledge area. You can have a meeting to discuss what team development is required. I suppose some meetings may be considered team building, if you use ‘meeting’ to mean ‘get people together for some purpose’.
Amended T&T are:
Interpersonal skills is now interpersonal and team skills, just in case you were wondering if developing a team needed any team skills. All the stuff you would expect is wrapped up in here: conflict management, influencing, motivation, negotiating and because it now extends to ‘team skills’ you can drop in team building too.
Personal assessment tools is now individual and team assessments. These are the tools that you use to help assess personal strengths and weaknesses. There are assessments I have done on the strength of my team as well, so that’s the kind of thing you would expect in here. Consider tools like surveys, interviews, team discussions, tests of ability e.g. for new starters during the interview process etc.
Outputs
There are 4 new outputs.
Team performance assessments and enterprise environmental factors updates stay the same.
Change requests: You may need to make changes to other areas of the project based on what has happened during this process. If so, go through the change control process as normal.
Project management plan updates: Because something in the resource management plan might need updating.
Project documents updates: Other documents might need updating as a result of you planning or doing development work with the team. For example, if someone now has a new skill, you can update their resource assignments because they can take on new tasks.
Organisational process assets updates: You might want to tell the managers of the individuals who have new skills so that they can update their logs. It’s small things that feel like common sense to me. For example, if the manager had a note that the individual needed to go on a leadership course, and they do that as part of the project, the manager can cross that off the list of her team’s training requirements.
And we’re at the end of this process, but not the Knowledge Area. We still have two more processes to cover, so next time it will be the turn of Manage Team.
Pin for later reading:
Posted on: August 03, 2018 05:07 PM |
Permalink