Core case study of team development in a three week project

¶ … IT Manager must do to Create and Maintain a Successful Project Team

Some project teams manage to achieve their goals in a timely fashion with little or no controversy or miscommunication, while others seem to struggle to even get off the ground. Although every project management situation is different, it is clear that successful project teams do not just happen, but are rather the result of effective project leadership. To determine what an IT manager must do to create and maintain a successful project team, this paper provides a review of the relevant peer-reviewed and scholarly literature concerning these issues, followed by a summary of the research and important findings in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

When people from different backgrounds come together to form a project team, they may bring with them longstanding grudges and unrelated issues that may adversely affect the functioning of the team. While every team setting will be different in some fashion, some of the many different types of challenges that are involved in achieving successful project team outcomes can be attributed to any of the following:

Long-held rivalries;

Different values and beliefs;

Power struggles;

Differing perceptions/perspectives;

Potential commitment of large amounts of time, resources and energy;

Differences in systems and procedures; and,

Responses of people who are not involved in the project (Scammel, 2001).

At the heart and soul of every successful project team is a project team manager. To be successful, project managers should invest the resources and time needed to forge effective partnerships within their teams (Scammel, 2001). The research to date indicates that project teams that collaborate across boundaries are more likely to do so effectively when the following characteristics are in place:

Synergy of culture and objectives;

Shared vision;

Commitment;

Respect and honesty; and,

Acknowledgement of the importance of effective teamwork (Scammell, 2001).

Developing these team characteristics can be facilitated by project managers investing sufficient time during preliminary meetings to address the following processes:

Surfacing expectations;

Creating the vision;

Building the objectives; and,

Agreeing the action plan (Scammel, 2001).

Perhaps the most important of these foregoing processes is clarifying team expectations so that everyone knows the goal and how to get there. In this regard, Scammel (2001) emphasizes that, "The process of surfacing expectations is a simple and yet very important one. Asking team members what they expect as part of being on the project team will enable similar, and also different, expectations to be aired and discussed" (p. 345). In addition, surfacing expectations can help preclude minor issues becoming larger problems that constrain project progress (Scammel, 2001). Assuming that project managers forge the creative and effective team they need, there are some other constraints to success that must be taken into account, particularly when the project team is comprised of staff members from information technology services and other company divisions that may have divergent ideas about how to proceed. For instance, according to Zoltners, Prabhakant and Lorimer (2009), "Creating a successful project team that includes people from both sales and IT is challenging" (p. 239). These challenges are related to the fundamentally different mindsets that employees in these two departments have as illustrated in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. The sales and IT mindsets

Source: Zoltners et al., 2009, p. 239

As can be discerned from Figure 1 above, the two mindsets involved in many IT projects are diametrically opposed to each other, making the need for an understanding of these opposing views an essential part of successful project management (Zoltners et al., 2009). Although IT project managers do not necessarily need to possess the same skill sets as their IT project members, some basic IT knowledge can help overcome the foregoing divergent mindsets. For instance, Hammond (2006) emphasizes that, "While it is unnecessary to be the world's expert in XML technology to lead a successful project team, you should know the rudiments. In the simplest terms, XML provides a mechanism for describing information" (p. 37). An important point made by Hammond (2006) concerns the need for IT project leaders to closely collaborate with the programmers on their team to ensure that everyone understands what can and cannot be accomplished with respect to the team's goals. In this regard, Hammond (2006) advises that, "The curse of XML is that the topic expert will have to climb in under the hood to understand what the programmer and the programming can and cannot do. The greater the interaction between the two, the more successful the project will be" (p. 37).