Project Management’eur

Project Collaboration Team

This post will deal with communication as it applies to project status. A subsequent post will discuss general dialog among the team members regarding the project.

Many projects involve collaboration with others. For many companies, especially small businesses, this involves collaboration with skilled personnel outside the company in order to either acquire access to skill sets not found among internal personnel, or simply to augment the internal resources in order to achieve project completion within a deadline.

Assembling this team should not only consider technical skills, but socially compatible personalities with a commitment to team cooperation to complete the project on target with the business goals and on time.

But however skilled and well-intentioned the individual project team members are, it is up to the project manager to provide the cohesive glue that keeps everybody on target throughout the project life cycle.

One thing a project manager will strive for is keeping the team motivated throughout the project. A big factor in this objective is involving each member of the team in the “big picture” so that each member can feel an ownership in the project. A project manager must be clear about the goals of the project, giving the team members a clear picture of what they must accomplish as a group to instill ownership at the outset.

Involve them in the big picture of the business and the project, so they’ll understand and participate properly in higher-level decisions that affect their technical work. They shouldn’t be handed a schedule; they should participate in making design tradeoff decisions and planning the entire project.
- Cinda Voegtli in Being Relative as Managers

To keep this motivation throughout the course of the project, all team members should have a comprehensive view of project progress, including task dependencies so that they can follow the progress of the group and contribute meaningful dialog to ensure continuous forward progress.

Teams working at a sustainable pace should be able to sustain that pace indefinitely and continue to make an appropriate amount of progress without inviting burnout. Members of the team should be able to stay focused while at work and not get too worn down—occasionally working overtime when it is needed, but only in short durations.
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Once the team can focus on specific items within a reasonable window, and can make commitments rather than be handed deadlines, sustainable pace is a critical element to helping the team reach those commitments. Most project activity is very relaxed at the beginning and becomes increasingly frantic as the end nears—a very unstable, and unsustainable, level of activity. If you set your time boxes to the right length, the team may have a brief ramp up period at the beginning to do their planning, followed by an extended period of focused but controlled activity, ending up with a brief decompression period at the end of the time box, where the team can reflect back on what they did and make adjustments. Many teams refer to this as having a nice rhythm. – Kent McDonald in Keeping Up the Pace

It should be noted that the team members should have input on what is “reasonable” for each of them to accomplish within a time window.

If one or more tasks is falling behind, there should be some indication of this early on to avoid the need for extensive overtime toward the end of the project in order to meet a deadline. Working extensive overtime adds stress and burnout to the team making them less productive per hour of work, feeding the stress factor in an endless cycle that can quickly get out of control and cause the project to fail.

Project Management for the Real World can help with these issues.

• It is possible for everyone to have a full comprehensive view of the project, all tasks including the detail of all worked logged against them
• It is possible for all documents related to the project to be stored on line under the project so that everyone has a view to the current version of each document.
• Unlimited task dependency chains can be established allowing team members to easily track tasks upon which their assigned task(s) depend or tasks which depend upon completion of their assigned tasks.
• The display for percent complete on a task is color coded to show early on when a task may be falling behind. This is determined by a rough calculation of a ratio of percent complete over elapsed time from task start date. This assumes that a task due date has been assigned.

These features can aid a project manager in being effective in keeping the team members involved in the big picture, and thus taking more ownership of their pieces of the project. They can also alert a project manager sooner rather than later if any tasks are lagging behind so that he/she can take steps early on to get these tasks back on track, thus reducing the chance of heavy overtime toward the end of the project.