How to mitigate challenges associated with organizing a project team

Introduction

Organizing and managing a project team is critical to organization success in a much more globalized world. Due primarily to the interconnectedness of many firms throughout the world, organizations both small and large require very dynamic and responsive teams. These teams will need to collaborate with one another as organizations now become to compete on a global scale. Exacerbating this issue is technology will allow more competitors to enter the market with little to no capital investment. These trends are only just beginning and are causing massive disruption across seemingly unrelated industries. Retail for example, has seen a dramatic change in its operations from a global perspective. Many clothing manufacturers source their products from countries with low labor costs, ship to the products to wealthier developed nations, while having global scale. All of these operations require a network of project teams, each with its own unique set of circumstances, needs, and capital requirement. If not managed properly, many operators in the retail space will simply disappear and cease to exist. We have seen with many dominate retail providers ranging from Sears, to Neiman Marcus.

The retail industry isn’t the only sector that has to deal with the implications of properly managing and organizing project team, the energy sector is yet another example of this. Much like the retail sector, energy too relies heavily on not only managing and organizing project teams, but doing so within a heavily regulated international context. Further compounding the issue is the threat and emergence of renewable energy, which threatens the role tradition energy suppliers play in a globalized world. As a result, organizing and managing project teams is essential to business success. Project teams, particularly for those who are directly involved in oil drilling operations must operate under a litany of regulations which include legal, environmental, and community obligations. To acquiesce to all of these regulations, project teams must be able to properly communicate and share information. Thankfully, technology helps to mitigate many of these communication barriers allowing teams to properly communication with one another effortlessly and seamlessly

Finally, technology plays an integral role in organizing and managing project teams. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many of these trends as companies continue to adopt technology to supplement their physical office space. As a result, technology will continue to play a much more integral role in organizing and managing project teams. For one, technology such as video conferencing and streaming services allow for a much more streamlined and quicker exchange of information between teams. Task management software such as Asana or Slack allows management greater transparency as to what a team is working on. These all allow for a much more effective work experience for project team members irrespective of their location.

Although all of the above trends look to favor the formation of project teams, managing them is not without their challenges. These challenges which include cultural challenge, language barriers, lack of accountability, lack of clear goals or success criteria, and inadequate risk management are all pertinent within an international context. This paper aims to identify common challenges associated with organizing and managing a team from an international and domestic context. Here, in order to overcome these challenges mangers, need to be much more flexible in their thinking than past generations. In addition, depending the industry in which the team operates, the ability to quickly access data and use it to make informed decisions will be critical.

Research Question and Problem Statement

The research topic is centered around the major challenges associated with organizing and managing a project team. The last few decades have seen rapid change as it relates to project teams, their structure and their configuration (PMI, 2017). Projects themselves have now evolved to be much large in scope and size, which much shorter timeframes for completion. Due primarily to technology and the heavy pace of innovation, project teams are now faced with a litany of competitors, all vying for market leadership and dominance. There is now a great deal more data, not to mention much less paper. The project manager's profile has also changed, with fewer and fewer experts from industries in that role, which is a shift from specific to a general project management concept.

Team management itself is also undergoing fundamental change. Organizations today all seek to earn high returns on capital while establishing sustainable competitive advantages. These advantages are primarily focused on the ability of project teams to properly identify company strengths and how to leverage them for the benefit of the organization. For technology centric firms, these project teams must also be able to process data quickly and have “first mover advantage” when competing with other technology firms. As a result, project management is often more likely to be the method intended for quality improvements towards improving the organization’s overall ability to compete in an ever-changing and dynamic technology market. In this regard, the management of project teams must be very well structured to allow for both change and growth. By utilizing advantages from established project management tools and techniques, organizations are better able to strategize and put into action innovative business approaches in order to gain competitive advantages over peers in the industry. Since the life of many organizations is bound hand in hand with the performance of their individual project teams, their overall importance has led to Project Management being viewed as a vital business practice. Project Management has been also deemed a practical approach for the reason that it is a foundation of organizational strategy much like functional tactics and as such is likely to be allied closely the organization’s overall strategy. It is for these reasons that challenges related to project teams must be identified and overcome. It first allows organizations to better compete with one another globally and domestically. Second, it allows the company to continue to innovate and establish products that are demanded by the market. Finally, overcoming these challenges allows all stakeholders to flourish including shareholders, employees, and communities.

COVID-19 has introduced new challenges related to remote work and its impact on the ability of others to work collaborative on a time without a physical in-person format. This has created challenges related to culture as it relates to the dynamics of a team (Aarseth, Rolestadas, & Anderson, 2014). In developing competitive project teams while empowering mangers to prepared for future, organizations need to determine the current team challenges and solutions for such challenges. As result, some of the major challenges that project teams will be summarized in this study.

Research Question

This analysis aims to answer the following questions:

1. What are the main challenges within project teams from and international and domestic context?

2. How do these challenges impact the overall performance and efficiency of project management and by extension, the organization as a whole?

3. What are the key parameters under each project management challenge that needs to be addressed?

Review of Relevant Literature

The literature relating to challenges associated with organizing project teams is varied. For one, although employing the knowledge of project management competently has been a vital topic of discussion due to the proliferation of technology, organizations still battle with how to come up with this strategic shift in their projects (Atkinson, Crawford, & Ward, 2006; Khan, Peters, Sahinel, Pozo-Pardo, & Dang, 2018), specifically when dealing with the future of international governance and oversight. Project management research, and by extension project team research is heavily dependent on the industry which is being studied. Capital intensive industry for example, often has a much more structured and efficient process for managing project teams. This is required as many of these organization operate and depend heavily on commodities for their profit. As a result, there is little, if any differentiation between product offerings in the market place. As a result, the business operations of the firm are heavily predicated on costs, efficiencies and a lean business model. Manager project teams within the context is likewise predicated on managing project teams based on cost and efficient operations.

Managing project teams in capital intensive industries that produce commodity products is based on a “lean mindset” The multidisciplinary perspective attempts to develop a holistic framework as it relates to managing and organizing project teams. This ultimately enables the successful delivery of projects both now and in the future. The research is this field is based on three interrelated pillars of operation (Nogeste, 2008) .

1. Lean Operations - adapt, enhance and advance management practices from other industries in response to the need for efficiency and effectiveness of projects

2. Accountability - incorporate the perspective of the people responsible for delivering projects by accentuating the psycho-social aspects

3. Adaptability - adapt projects to dynamic environments in order to sustain competitive advantage in the long run with Dynamic Capabilities and adapt PM methods to developing countries.

Project teams in capital intensive businesses must employ these operations in order to overcome many of the challenges they will face through their operations. The above are important elements as they allow teams to better matriculate the perils of operating in a highly capital-intensive business which is often predicated with lower margins. Teams, for example, must be adaptable as it relates to their operations and use applicable data to make better informed decisions. Data analysis, is particularly critical for project teams of the future. Data is quickly becoming a resource that provides organizations with competitive advantages relative to peers in the industry. It allows teams to overcome challenges as they have the data and facts to make better decisions that competitors can. This allows project teams to leverage the pillars mentioned above to leverage these insights.

Accountability, is also needed to overcome challenges for project management teams as well. Here, particularly for large, bureaucratic organizations, teams are often not held accountable for results directly. Instead, business segment results are evaluated which often incorporates many disparate project teams. As a result, teams are not as emboldened or empowered to innovate and be creative with their work. This ultimately, leads to the challenges presented above related to managing teams as they are often looking to simply maintain the status quo. By maintaining the status quo, the organization is not innovating or properly challenging competitors in the market place. This ultimately leads to stale products, lower oversight, inferior products, and lower profits. To avoid this challenge, management must hold all teams accountable for their work product and overall actions. By doing so, they can ensure that corporate culture and objectives are properly maintained. Likewise, it provides teams will clear and concise objective in which to objective. This ultimately removes ambiguity we making assessments of project teams and the overall accomplishments.

Analysis

Findings of this review paper suggest that project managers are dealing with a number of challenges in daily activities, which have required them to employ effective supervision criteria to reduce flawed results, rejection, and rework activities. PMs should implement, at the early stage of the management plan, an effective scope management, which can mitigate the risks of work interruptions due to unexpected scope creep (Hwang & Ng, 2013; Khan et al., 2018). Table 1 below provides a summary of the challenges that many projects teams face.