How to get our project teams to perform similarly?

A few thoughts:
1. Transferring knowledge as part of a hand off to others is better than not doing so I suppose, but is often less effective than we hope. The problem is that tacit knowledge takes a lot of time to learn, and that's what's often required for effectiveness. I've seen a lot of projects where they've attempted this sort of thing, and it's definitely helped, but when I would visit the team that the work was handed off to a few months later they were still investing time to learn from scratch what that had supposedly picked up during the transfer. We need to look at the overall lifecycle, not just the project portion that we're involved with.
2. One-off projects are definitely good candidates for outsourcing. Until you discover that it's not a one-off, or that you need to maintain and evolve the output of the project. Then you start wishing you'd done it yourself, sometimes as you're redoing it again.
3. Hiring contractors for the specialties is definitely a good idea. A much better idea is to also include in the contract that they coach and teach their skills to your people AND you then ensure that your people step up and do so. Sadly I hear a lot of talk from organizations about this strategy but don't see as much execution of it. I've seen a lot of high-priced specialists who were supposed to be shadowed but then weren't because the FTEs couldn't be freed up.
4. Outsourcing for cost savings rarely seems to work out in practice. I hear about the cost savings of outsourcing all the time, and then when I look at the "business cases" justifying these outsourcing efforts they almost always end up being wishful works of fiction at best. To do it right you need to consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) as well as the total benefit of ownership (TBO), and both of these figures require a systems mindset to actually calculate. How much work needs to occur on the customer end to specify, manage, govern, and validate the outsourcing work? That adds up quickly, and it's important to recognize that outsourcing efforts typically require significantly more of these activities than insourced work does. What is the cost of contract management, in particular change management when you want to evolve the requirements of the work? From an operational point of view, what inefficiencies are being introduced within the customer organization to work with the outsource company. For example, a few months ago I was working with an organization that walked me through the cost savings they'd achieved through outsourcing their help desk. They honestly believed they were getting a great deal because they only looked at the costs of the help desk operation, which in fact were lower than when it was insourced. So we then worked through the overall process from the point of view of the people being served by the outsourced help desk. Wait time had skyrocketed. They effectively had expensive people wasting time waiting to be served by inexpensive people. So I suggested we take those costs into account. They were uncomfortable with that idea. Then we discovered that the problems weren't being solved as often as before, requiring new tickets to be submitted and more waiting to occur. So I suggested we take those costs into account, and they were also uncomfortable with that suggestion. Bottom line was that when we calculated the total value of ownership (TVO), TBO-TCO, we discovered that it was negative. Their great deal was actually an incredibly bad deal in practice. Worse yet, when we started working through potential scenarios to fix the help desk process we couldn't see any way to make it cost effective and still involve the outsourcing company. And I've lost track of the number of times I've run into situations like this.

To widen the view about standups:
I saw my 1st in 1997 when we hired a gig PM to save a project (I was leading the PMO then). His leadership style was command/control and coercive. And adaptive. Highly successful. He forced the core team to be in the office every morning 7am. 15 minutes standup and you better be prepared.

Dear Thomas
It's just the daily meeting proposed in some agile frameworks.

I know some organizations that use early day briefing and late day debriefing

When team and individual goals are not aligned with the organization's goals, weekly coaching sessions so that the team performs high

Does this method allow for medium and long term results?

Luis,

Look at the opposite end of the spectrum, if you have a leader who is disengaged, hypocritical, arrogant, and simply doesn’t support his/her team or the project – do you think that team will be at the top of their game, moving like a well-oiled machine? More than likely, that team will be ineffective and will have resigned to the following statement, “I care about this team and project to the same degree as my boss – I don’t care.”

On the side of my original statement, a leader who is modeling all the positive elements they wish to see in their team will likely have their team saying the following, “My boss supports me and is on this journey with me, I will push through and do my part to bring this project home – just as he/she is”

So, yes, a leader who models the principle behaviors they wish to see in their team – will achieve optimal performance.

Luis
Sure you can. But the level of aptitude will have an influence on how successful it will be. As I mentioned in my response to Scott, you can teach anybody anything and they can get it right, even be good at it. But only in a perfect world will it work. Let's move away fro F1 and look at music. How do I get two orchestras to perform at the same level? I give them the right tools and train them. But if you are a 'musician like me it will only be effective if we keep on playing twinkle twinkle little star because that is what we have been practicing like forever. If you throw anything else at me there is going to be chaos. A good developer, BA or PM has a certain aptitude that makes them good at using the tools, techniques and soft skills required to do a good job. Do all people work in jobs where their aptitude is highest? Definitely not and that is why you get high, medium and low performing individuals in any profession. Are you useless if you are not a prodigy? Definitely not.

Dear Luis, Thomas

Not sure whether I can respond on this topic.

Based on my experience, companies did outsourced services when IBM changed their revenue model (POI and PON) during late 80s to millennium. It worked reasonably well as that disruption enabled several sectors and organisations to take off some inefficiencies from people, process and technology perspective. Then Microsoft, Google and Apple as companies introduced another disruption/paradigm in late 90’s. We are still going through that change. This has lead several organisations to rethink on what is core and what must be outsourced. Until they find their own answers based on their organisational maturities, this issue will linger. A balanced approach (in-house+outsourcing) is a possible answer for now. Until then, end customers will have cost to bear depending on the country economic status, political reforms, development agendas and people agendas.

Luis,

Look at the opposite end of the spectrum, if you have a leader who is disengaged, hypocritical, arrogant, and simply doesn’t support his/her team or the project – do you think that team will be at the top of their game, moving like a well-oiled machine? More than likely, that team will be ineffective and will have resigned to the following statement, “I care about this team and project to the same degree as my boss – I don’t care.”

On the side of my original statement, a leader who is modeling all the positive elements they wish to see in their team will likely have their team saying the following, “My boss supports me and is on this journey with me, I will push through and do my part to bring this project home – just as he/she is”

So, yes, a leader who models the principle behaviors they wish to see in their team – will achieve optimal performance.

Luis
there are good replies about performance in this post.
My motto is offering perspectives, so I offered views from my life, which go beyond performance or efficiency.

Very interesting comments from our fellow colleagues. The team transitions as per the Tuckman model from Forming into Performing and if a team member changes, it might throw the team back to the storming stage.

Continuity of the same team working together will create trust and the team will become more monolithic (One Unit) and at this point it will be performing at is best.