Team Management

improve team cohesion

Ways to improve team cohesion

Have you considered ways to improve team cohesion? As a Project Manager it is all too easy to get caught up in the day to day of running your project.  There are a million and one things that need to be done, you’ve got pressure being put on you from your Senior Executive to deliver, and things may not always be going as well as you would like. Working on assisting the team to work better together is probably the furthest thing from your mind.

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How to re establish trust the right way

Do you have any idea how to re-establish trust the right way?  Trust is something that you feel in a way that it’s hard to describe.  You know it exists, or you don’t.

You trust one person in your team and not trust a number of others.  This impacts on your ability, as the Project Manager, to get things done, and it costs your project both time and money.

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Project team roles and responsibilities

A project team is like a mini organisation where understanding of roles and responsibilities is important
If you look at a project as a mini organisation and consider that it is very important that the people working in your ‘mini organisation’ fully understand their roles and responsibilities, just as is the case in any organisation or business, then this might help alleviate some issues that you may have with teamwork and delivery output.

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How do you collaborate?

The ability to collaborate as a project team is the key to it’s success.  As the Project Manager you need to ensure that collaboration across the team is easy and working.

For the past four months I have been using a collaboration tool for my own projects.  There are a number of these tools available in the market, each with similar and different features.

I’m going to talk about my own personal experiences of using Xtrant so that you gain some idea of the value that I see in using this sort of tool.

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Project teams perform like a Premiership team

After watching sporting teams playing in the finals (and ultimately the Grand Final) I realised that there is a strong connection between these high performing teams and project teams that perform well and succeed.  How you may ask?

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Project team culture is important

I’ve spoken before about what I see as the really strong value in creating what I call a ‘One Project Team culture‘  and a discussion that I had today reinforced my views on this principle.

Many projects fail, because there is too much tension around ‘who owns the system’ (business or IT); ‘they don’t deliver’ (and ‘they’ usually refers to the IT team/department; ‘you wanted too much’ (which is IT talking about the business); ‘you didn’t let us do our job’ (again IT talking about the business); ‘we know what’s best’ (IT talking TO the business).

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What does it take to manage a project?

In my opinion most people don’t really understand what ‘managing’ a project is actually about.

I have seen many project managers who do everything other than actually ‘manage’ what needs to be done in order to deliver the project.  And in seeing this occur I also see that the project is usually flailing, falling behind, and there are problems delivering.

So, what does it actually mean to ‘manage’ when we talk in terms of a project.

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Communicate your project plan

Project managers are taught that if they spend hours developing a good clear and structured project plan, then their project has a better chance of success. Whilst the plan might ‘contribute’ to the success of a project by ensuring that tasks are defined, or at least listed, and there is some method for how the project is going to be run, the plan is only as good as your communication of it.

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Project individuals vs Project team

A project team needs to be a group of individuals all striving for the same outcome. Let’s look at the difference of people that work as individuals on a project versus those that are really working as part of the team.

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