With the ten key management principles as our foundation, let’s take a look at a few proven techniques that generally lead to better project team performance:
- Conduct team kickoffs—Conduct separate kickoff meetings with your core team at the beginning of each phase. This is an excellent way to reset expectations on project context, project goals and priorities, team member roles and responsibilities, team member assignments, project schedule, and team procedures.
TipUtilize mini-kickoff meetings at the beginning of each project phase, not just the start of the entire project, to reset expectations. - Collocate—Congregating team members in one place is not always possible, and it is becoming more uncommon as project work becomes increasingly distributed. However, results speak for themselves. When project team members are physically located in the same area, it is much easier to build relationships, share ideas and experiences, collaborate on assignments, develop answers to problems, and increase team synergy.
- Use meeting time wisely—To communicate both respect and value for individuals’ time, and to help team productivity, have a definite purpose or need for any team meeting and confirm that this purpose is understood by all team members. At a minimum, conduct a general team status meeting each week to share knowledge and lessons learned, and to provide gentle peer pressure accountability. The need for formal meetings varies depending on the project approach utilized, how the team is naturally collaborating, the composition of the team, team productivity, and the list of outstanding issues.
- Develop a team charter—To align individual expectations with desired team behaviors, develop a team charter that defines the guidelines, procedures, and principles by which the team will operate. The important thing here is not whether you take the time to document this, but it is the act of working with the team to develop these guidelines and procedures. This way, much like the overall project plan and schedule, the charter becomes theirs.
- Set standards—Especially on projects where multiple individuals might be doing the same type of work or when work is outsourced, develop and communicate the standards the work must meet to be accepted. This helps clarify expectations, reduces rework activity, improves quality, and leverages expert knowledge.
- Leverage expertise—This is an invaluable method to improve team performance and improve the skills of multiple individuals, especially in cases where the project involves newer technologies, the primary resource pools do not have adequate skill levels, or the organization needs to avoid allocating their most senior, sought-after talent on a single project.
- Resolve conflicts right away—High-performing teams do not let intrateam conflicts or project issues linger, because they can adversely affect team productivity if they do. As the project manager, you need to facilitate resolutions quickly. This does not mean that you do not listen and make rash judgments. It means that you deal with it—don’t avoid it. In all cases, it is very important that you stay objective, treat all sides with respect, place your focus on potential solutions, and seek out win-win scenarios.
- Prepare for client interactions—To better manage client expectations and avoid unproductive issues, prepare the team for direct client interactions. Make sure they understand the project from the client’s perspective, the expectation the client has of the team’s abilities, specific actions to take if they need assistance when they are with the client, and any talking points to either avoid or emphasize.
- Set up a project repository—To help facilitate team productivity, share knowledge, and protect project assets, set up a common repository that is accessible by all core team members to store project work products and project management deliverables. We discussed this in greater detail in “Managing Project Deliverables.”
- Set up a team collaboration environment—To encourage and make it easy for the team to work together on project work items—especially when the team is distributed or virtual in nature—set up the appropriate collaboration tools and environments. This normally means setting up one or more online tools to enable team members to do one or more of the following: discuss topics (group chat), facilitate team meetings (web conferencing), view and edit a common work product, and track changes to a work product. “The Fun Never Stops,” for more information on project collaboration tools.
- Develop team rituals—To help build team unity, develop specific rituals that engage the entire team. Examples include going out to lunch together on a certain day each week, sharing breakfast together on a certain day each week, celebrating individual birthdays or anniversaries, and so forth.
- Effective task assignments—I’ve talked about this one in various ways many times already, but the point I want to emphasize here is that you can’t just assume a task assignment is understood and will be done because it appears on the schedule and there is a person’s name beside it. The keys here are the following:
- Instill a sense of ownership on assigned tasks. Look for modules or domains that specific people can have lead responsibility over.
- Verify that the person assigned the work is clear on task completion criteria. This will avoid the need to micromanage (per M-W) your team. (Because I’m naturally lazy, this is an important one for me.)
NoteThe Pareto principle is also known as the “80-20” rule. It’s a common rule of thumb and an effective management tool that states, “20 percent of something is always responsible for 80 percent of the results.” - Ensure that one person is primarily responsible for a task and that you have buy-in on that responsibility.
- Ensure that the level of schedule detail is appropriate to effectively assign and monitor work.
- Plan for orientation—For any new team member joining your project, there is an introductory orientation period. Your goal is to streamline this period and have each team member at maximum productivity as soon as possible. The four specific actions I employ are the following:
- Protect your schedule—Do not assume the new team member will be 100% productive on day one. The length of the ramp-up period will be specific to the project, work assignments, and previous work experiences.
- Prepare an orientation packet—Put yourself in the new team member’s shoes and think about what you need to know to get a solid understanding of the project environment.
- Set up the work environment in advance—In any project environment where team members need specific equipment, tools, or access privileges to do their work, do whatever you can to get this set up before the team member starts. If you can’t, account for this in your schedule.
- Invest the time up front—Plan on spending time with any new team member up front. By investing focused attention with any new team member, you can better communicate your energy for the project and the expectations for the project, their role, and their contributions. As an avid follower of the Pareto principle, this is a clear case where spending a little extra time up front prevents the need to spend a lot more time down the road on team productivity issues.
- Plug in—To help facilitate team performance, you must stay connected with the team. Keys here are to stay visible, use the same communication channels the team is using, take time to meet with each team member one-on-one, and make sure the team knows you are there to help them be productive.
- Share leadership responsibilities—To help team members develop leadership skills and to help build commitment to the project, look for opportunities to share leadership responsibilities. This is natural on larger and cross-functional projects.
Special Situations
There are going to be project situations in which you won’t have a stellar, high-performing team. There might be times when you have just the opposite situation to deal with. In either case, you still need to get the work done. It’s in these situations where your goal is to get better team performance. Although we could spend an entire on all the problem situations you might encounter, I at least want to spend a section examining some special situations related to project team performance that you are likely to encounter and offer a few helpful recommendations in each case.
- Poor performers—Poor performers generally fall into two categories: unacceptable work results or unacceptable behaviors. In many cases, the poor performance is a result of unclear expectations. If faced with this situation, keep these action items in mind: TipKeep in mind that the rest of the team is watching how you deal with these situations. Your challenge is to strike the balance between handling the person fairly and not letting the poor performance become a drag on the team.
- Verify expectations—On first occurrences, don’t overreact—verify the expectations that the team member had and take responsibility for any lack of clarity.
- Provide feedback—After you have proper information, provide specific feedback to the team member as soon as possible in a private setting. Focus on the behavior or result, not the person. TipPerformance feedback should be timely, discreet, and specific.
- Enable success—Do everything that you can do to enable each team member’s success. Provide resources. Knock down obstacles. Provide every opportunity for their performance to improve.
- Initiate backup plans—At the same time, you cannot assume their performance will get better. At the first signs of performance issues, start thinking about what you can do to mitigate the impact to the project if you do need to replace the team member or if the performance does not improve.
- Cut your losses—Assuming you’ve done everything mentioned so far, there comes a time when you must cut your losses. The main reason why a poor performer needs to be removed is the effect it can have on the performance and morale of the rest of the team.
- High-maintenance staff—This group of team members includes those individuals who have a reputation of either being difficult to work with or possessing unusual personalities. In most cases, these are the people you need for your key critical path tasks—of course. From experience, here are my two key recommendations for these situations:
- Check for yourself—Don’t assume the reputation (the perception) is totally true. Verify for yourself. I have found that in many cases, these individuals are unfairly labeled. These labels often say more about the people who are uncomfortable working with individuals who are different from them than anything else.
- Treat them the same—Use the same approach with them as you would any other team member. Work to understand their motivators, clarify expectations, avoid surprises, and help them be successful.
- Schedule developed without team—I know I emphasize the importance and the value in developing the detail project plan and schedule with the team. I also realize this does not always occur in the real world (shocking, I know). If you find yourself in a situation where either you or your team is asked to take responsibility for a schedule that you or they did not help develop, you must take the time to review the schedule. You need to get buy-in from the team members before continuing. Two important items for consideration here:
- Understand the schedule assumptions—In many of these situations, team members totally dismiss the merits of a schedule because they are not aware of the assumptions that serve as the foundation for the schedule. Key assumptions include those about resource ability and quality level of work product (completion criteria).
- Identify risks—If there are gaps between the schedule assumptions and project reality, or if you cannot get commitment from the team, you have some new project risks, if not outright issues. Follow your designated risk and issue management procedures to handle it.
The Absolute Minimum
At this point, you should have a solid understanding of the following:
- The core traits for high-performing teams are clarity, commitment, professionalism, synergy, and trust.
- In most situations, a participative approach to project management, decision making, conflict resolution, and brainstorming leads to better project team performance.
- The key project management skills that are needed to lead better project team performance include leadership, communication, facilitation, interpersonal, and team-building skills.
- The ten key management principles that lead to better project team performance are
- Adapt management style to best meet the needs of the project.
- Select your project team yourself whenever possible.
- Develop the project plan and schedule with the team.
- Keep the team focused on both their immediate tasks and on the project’s big picture.
- Set clear expectations.
- Enable each team member to be as productive as possible.
- Strive to improve the marketability of each person on your team.
- Leverage the individual strengths to best accomplish the project goals.
- Constantly look to recognize and reward the accomplishments and good work of your team members.
- Use team-building methods and procedures to help develop team synergy.
Figure 19.1 summarizes the main points.
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