Management the Development of a Project Team

Successful project teams do not happen on their own. They exist because project leaders possess the skills to guide their teams to be effective, and because those leaders
know how to manage a team to produce results.

With supportive leadership, motivation, and commitment, a project team will move efficiently through the project stages to a successful conclusion.

How coud success be defined? (by Jose Ferreiro)

- Helping others realize their goals while pursuing ours.

- Success is the progressive realization of personal, worthwhile, pre-determined goals.

- Progressive realization means that success is not a destination, it is a journey and you start being successful the moment you take the first step. Personal means that my goals will not motivate you, and your goals will not motivate me. Worthwhile means that goals must have an ethical quality or they won't have the power to attract you to them. Pre-determined means that goals never happen by accident, always on purpose.

- Success is a continual journey!!!

- A success is someone who gets up one more time than he/she gets knocked down.

- You can not succeed unless you have failed. Failure is not a bad thing it is a growing experience.

- Success is a PASSION!!!

- Success is a personal goal-oriented concept, in which an individual generates and strives to reach. The end result can be attained by luck or self-motivated ambition. One could argue that luck is a nonfactor, but the essence of success is the end result and not the facets of the journey of which one arrives. 

Post-it Brainstorming brings team building UP!

As a project manager, how can you influence people motivation in your team? How would a manager possibly create something which is not only fun for her/him but also for the team spirit. Hey! Do you a have a new project arising soon?

If yes, try the following:

* Document the objective from stakeholders.

* Provide the necessary information to the newly resources assigned to this project.

* Invite everyone to be involved in a brainstorming session (e.g the Work Breakdown Structure, WBS) where you will listen to everyone's view and get everybody involved from the very beginning. Do not forget, lack of involvement at this stage may mean lack of commitment later. Also, chances are that your team resources do not know each other. Therefore, all team members must still go through stages of development. And as a project manager you must monitor, support and manage the stages of the team development. It is important that every member team establishes an identity within the project and finds her/his place in the group.

Therefore, the post-it brainstorming is a team building activity where you may get ideas from everybody and get everybody to know each other. Those ideas may be writing on post-it notes and then sticked them on a wall by the resources. Provide post-it block with different color to the members. This will already allow you to categorize the ideas by group. Let's assume that grey is for "Marketing" team group, green for "Engineering" team group, etc, etc... The goal will be to get a large number of ideas for the project by group. As a "director of the orchestra" you will lead the interaction between the team members and provide a discussion as a baseline for the meeting. Why do they think that this idea is great? And you will notice at the end of this "Post-it brainstorming" activity you should see a boost in team's commitment. At the same time everybody enjoyed the team work and "THE WORK".

Do not forget unhappy workers are unproductive... Also, don't be naive, resources work under the influence of events that are often beyond of your control. You should mitigate this risk (Refer to Maslow's pyramid).

Lastly, as a conclusion, I will never stress enough that a key success for the project is to have motivated and engaged people involved in the project in order to maximize the productivity and effort.