Project team and responsibilities, PI, part 8.

Project team and responsibilities

We have laced out the foundation of project management i.e., specified the goal, deliverables, scope and success criteria, now it's time to choose the right team, a crucial part of the initiation phase and every PM should take this seriously, while choosing the right team we need to consider following key points before going any further

• Required roles.
• Team size: Complex project with sub tasks can required larger team to work on, while simple straight forward expectation need only few people to work on.
• Necessary skills: Having a technical skill is highly valued but a functioning team need more than just having technical skills, they also need interpersonal skills to minimize team related issues, remember skills can be taught, if the motivation is good enough.
• Availability: There are few factors to consider except creating a team with available members or members getting assigned from project sponsors (pre-assignment) i.e., a diverse team may have conflict within, it important to dedicate time early on in the team building process to develop trust between team members.
• Motivation: As a PM, it a responsibility to engage the team and keep them motivated because a person who is volunteer vs a person who is assigned on the team don’t feel motivated, it a PM responsibility to keep team engaged and motivated to overcome any obstacles.

Further project role can be divided into

• Stakeholders: Anyone involved in the project who has vested interest in the project success are project stakeholders, Primary Stakeholders are people who expect to benefit from the project completion i.e., All of the team members, users, customers and sponsors, while Secondary stake holders plays an intermediatory role, for example they can be members or contractor or legal advisors of the partner organization, while the outcome of the project might not affect them directly.
• Project sponsors: A project sponsors are primary stakeholders who is accountable for the project. They ensure the project delivers upon the agreed values of the business and sometimes they fund the project, and communicate directly with managers and key stakeholder, for example: Director of Product
• Team Members: Team members are primary stakeholders who are doing the things and making things possible.
• Customers and Users: Consider customers as buyers vs user are the people who will be using the end outcome.
• Project Managers

The most important part about program management is understanding the personalities of the people you work with so that you can tailor your approach to make sure that you’re working effectively with them.

At the end of the day, technical problems aren’t that hard. People problems are really hard. And making sure that your team is sold and bought in on a vision and the project is super, super important.