Ten Characteristics of Successful Project Teams – Part 3

In Part 2 of this series we examined the items three and four of ten characteristics ofsuccessful project teams: open and clear communication and effective decision making.  Here is the full list of the ten main characteristics of successful project teams that we will be examining in this series:

• Clearly defined goals
• Clearly defined roles
• Open and clear communication
• Effective decision making
• Balanced participation
• Valued diversity
• Managed conflict
• Positive atmosphere
• Cooperative relationships
• Participative leadership

For Part 3 of this series, we’ll examine item five above in more detail: balanced participation.

Balanced participation

If communication is the most important team characteristic, participation is the second most important. Without participation, you don’t have a team; you have a group of bodies.

Read more »

Ten Characteristics of Successful Project Teams – Part 2

In Part 1 of this series we examined the first two of ten characteristics of successfulproject teams: clearly defined goals and clearly defined roles.  Here is the full list of the ten main characteristics of successful project teams that we will be examining in this series:

• Clearly defined goals
• Clearly defined roles
• Open and clear communication
• Effective decision making
• Balanced participation
• Valued diversity
• Managed conflict
• Positive atmosphere
• Cooperative relationships
• Participative leadership

For Part 2 of this series, we’ll examine items three and four above in more detail: open and clear communication and effective decision making.

Open and clear communication

The importance of open and clear communication cannot be stressed enough. This is probably the most important characteristic for high-performance teams. Many different problems that arise on projects can often be can be traced back to poor communication or lack of communication skills, such as listening well or providing constructive feedback.

Read more »

Don’t overwrite project files

The Better Projects blog, which is run by Craig Brown, has touched on the topic of configuration management recently.  The focus of the blog is on software development projects and it often takes a business analysis angle.  However, any project requires good configuration management processes – and project managers as well as business analysts can use config management techniques to ensure that project files and products are kept in order.

Configuration management is the business of creating, maintaining and controlling the change of configuration during the project lifecycle.  A Config Management Strategy sets out how products will be controlled and protected, and who can make changes to them.  Projects will also have a config management system, which is an approach that is used to manage config data.  You might use the config management system of your customer or supplier rather than reinvent one yourself, although your PMO probably has an approach to use in the absence of anything else.
Read more »

Ten Characteristics of Successful Project Teams – Part 1

Have you ever been a member of a high-performing, smoothly running team? If you have been, it’s an experience that you are not likely to forget. On this type of team there is usually a strong trust bond, people work cooperatively together to reach the common project goals, and often the project is even more successful than the project manager and customer could have imagined. These types of teams generally have some key characteristics in common that help make them the effective, high-performing teams that they are.  In this series, we’ll examine ten key characteristics of these types of teams.

These ten main characteristics of successful project teams are:

• Clearly defined goals
• Clearly defined roles
• Open and clear communication
• Effective decision making
• Balanced participation
• Valued diversity
• Managed conflict
• Positive atmosphere
• Cooperative relationships
• Participative leadership

For Part 1 of this series, we’ll examine the first two in more detail: clearly defined goals and clearly defined roles.

Read more »

Maximizing the Project Budget: Knowing When to Downsize

We often walk a very thin line on our projects between budget success and budget failure.  It really doesn’t matter if you’re working with a $50,000 project budget or a $5 million project budget.  It’s all planned for and it can get eaten up rather quickly if it’s not being forecasted and tracked carefully by the project manager and delivery team.

Resource utilization on the project obviously plays a key role in the successful management of the project budget.  Carefully administering the project schedule and task assignments to strategically know when to onboard the right resource is critical to the project’s financial success.  You can’t afford to bring your lead developer on at, say, a $130/hour bill rate to the customer if you’re only in the project kickoff phase.  Using a nice project planner such as Seavus’ Project Planner for resource planning activities can go along way in planning out all of your resource usage.

There’s no reason to fill your entire team out at the onset of the project when the early work of customer requirements review may only need the involvement of the project manager and business analyst.  The danger of course, is that the right resource may not be available when you actually do need them due to unforeseen circumstances on one of the company’s other project engagements.  However, carefully project planning and forecasting of resources and the budget should help you get the personnel you need when you need them.

Read more »