Which of these is troubling your project - how can you tell?

You can’t deliver a project with just a plan and no team; however, you can deliver a project with a team and no plan. While project managers everywhere would like to believe otherwise, it actually happens all the time.

But the planless team actually has a plan – it’s in their training, in their head, or in their DNA. In the end, having a plan and having a team are inseparable concepts – the challenge is that the two are generally dealt with separately: during a project they should be dealt with as one. It is often the mismatch between the two that frustrates leaders and troubles projects.

Plans and Teamwork

Weak plans are often attributed to changing requirements, too little (or too much) detail, lack of flexibility or contingency, or the plan being ‘window dressing’ to appease management.

An often overlooked aspect of building a plan is that its construction has a major impact of how much teamwork is required to successfully execute it. Consider a plan where every month a critical deliverable has to handoff between teams in different parts of the world. Consider a plan where one 500 hour task is dependant on another 500 hour task and the teams responsible for each are left to sort our how they interface. Or, worse yet, the first team simply throws their deliverable over the wall to the next team. These are handoffs and task sizes that everyone supposedly knows to not allow in a plan.

But consider some more subtle teamwork challenges. Consider a task on the critical path that is dependant on ten prior tasks to start work. The classic ‘Golden Moment’. But what if it is five tasks all on the critical path? What if it depends on eight tasks folding into one task and none are receiving attention since they are two weeks off of the critical path? What about a one-person two day task receiving a deliverable from a six-person 10 day task? How does the person receiving the work keep up with all aspects of what they are about to receive? When you are receiving work from another person or team the status is not just yes or no – it’s far more complex than that.

There are dozens of metrics that affect the teamwork complexity of a plan. A troubled project should look at the teamwork required for what they are trying to do.

People and Teamwork

Team members ‘check-out’ from projects for a variety of reasons including: not knowing each other, not feeling support from leaders, disagreement with the validity of the deliverable, frustration over project communications, or not knowing other team member’s roles.

These teamwork issues can delay even a well-crafted project plan. While seasoned and team-savvy management can usually deal with these issues, many managers and project managers have neither the training nor the experience to handle complex teamwork challenges.

The most common prescriptive, teambuilding, is only available at a cost that is not in reach for a team that is most likely already behind schedule and in trouble by the time symptoms are apparent.

Three Steps to Project Teamwork

First, make sure that the traditional project management constructs are in place. Be sure that requirements are clear and stable, that the plan is built to contemporary standards, and it is the center of daily work. A project plan that is not updated regularly is about as useful as a personal calendar that you haven’t updated for two weeks. Not only does it not contain current information, but it is likely to contain information that can lead someone to do the wrong work.

Second, look at the plan’s teamwork requirements. Examine the working relationships of the people that are connected by dependencies and are either on or near the project’s critical path. If those working relationships are not solid - if the people don’t have multiple threads of intensively and extensively shared project and task information - then take steps to improve their working relationships. Ensure that they understand that their responsibilities include the effectiveness of the communications between their tasks and those tasks that they depend on and tasks that require their work.

Third, look at actual teamwork. You need to look at who is actually working with whom, and who is avoiding working with whom. If the non-collaborators have critical task connections, take steps to build or supplement their working relationships.

Also look at leadership barriers to teamwork. These could include: antiquated chain-of-command leadership styles, overloaded managers or leaders that are the locus of communications between members of the project teams, or competition between individuals or teams for positions of power in the business. These are real issues that affect team performance and not just fodder for hall-talk.

Look at locational barriers to teamwork. These can include physical location (and not just offshore, sometimes in the next office) cultural differences, and physical barriers. A common physical barrier is individuals being overwhelmed by email. This problem is so prevalent that saying that you didn’t receive an email from someone is the 21^st century equivalent of ‘the dog ate my homework’. Business leaders’ need to provide communications tools better suited to project work than email.

Work the Team

Fixing teamwork is no longer a protracted and ambiguous process where the team is held hostage by a consultant with a flipchart. New metrics-based and data-driven methods which use the concepts in this article can rapidly, specifically, and inexpensively identify project teamwork weaknesses and show the team leader a path to get the team back on track.

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