Learning More About Project Teams!
 
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“Together everyone achieves more.”

-- Who knows, but it makes sense!

“Teamwork is the fuel that allows common people to produce uncommon results.”

-- Successories poster

“Effective teams are a necessary part of any high performance organization.”

-- Kevin McManus, the Systems Guy

What is a Project Team?

All organizations have at least one project team. Project teams stay intact until the project they are working on is finished. In some cases, the team remains intact to work on a new project, as with some Quality Circle processes. Examples of project teams include kaizen teams, tiger teams, and quality circles.

Project Team Characteristics

A project team is a cross-functional group of employees that meets regularly to:

  • Support through action one or more of the organizational or location objectives
  • Carry a project through from start to finish, using a disciplined development approach
  • Evaluate action success to-date and make adjustments that are needed
  • Proactively attack key project needs that extend into two or more work groups

The group's makeup (size, membership, and stability) is primarily influenced by:

  • The nature of the given project or objective
  • The degree of cross functional representation required
  • The ability of each individual to actively participate in the project's completion
  • Limiting the group's size to ten or less people for problem solving effectiveness
  • The type of objective work required -- info sharing versus problem solving
  • Providing departmental representation without departmental overload
  • The urgency for project implementation

Meeting frequency, location, and timing options include:

  • Meeting regularly until the objective is complete
  • Meeting lengths being around one hour or less
  • Getting together every one or two weeks, depending on the nature of and need for the project (kaizen designs do all of their work over 2-3 days)
  • Limiting the active number of project teams in process at any given time
  • Normally meeting in the standard locations that are available

Skills desired of members would include:

  • A desire for and understanding of continuous improvement and quality
  • A basic awareness of communication, problem solving, decision making, and project development tools
  • Shared responsibility in the content, impact, and success of the project
  • An understanding of how the project will impact the profitability of the organization
  • The ability to spend time on project development tasks between meetings

Over time, as the team matures, possible changes will include:

  • A shift from management member dominance to more support / hourly representation
  • Faster completion of the project development cycle
  • A shift from general to specific project content in some cases
  • An increase in active project teams in action at a given time as resources increase

Possible constraints to team effectiveness and regular meetings include:

  • Requiring a given person to lead or to be on too many teams
  • Failing to have a given department actively represented
  • Not having the necessary support information for prompt decision making
  • Failing to regularly complete action items away from the meeting
  • Lack of effective team leadership
  • Not developing and following a systematic plan for project completion

Would you like to learn more about other team types?

Select the type of team that you would like to learn more about to go directly to that type. Review the summary matrix that is provided through that link to gain a 'big picture' view of how the three team types compare to each other. Operational definitions for each team types are also provided on that summary webpage.
What are focus teams?

Would you like to learn more about the "Team Effectiveness" workbook?

Click on one of the following links to learn even more about how this workbook can help the teams you already have in place, and those that you might be thinking about using, even more effective:

"Myths and Realities of Team Effectiveness" workbook overview
Summary of workbook exercises
Summary of key team myths and questions
Job Design Power System
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Copyright © 2005, Great Systems!
Last Revised - July 1, 2005		 For pricing or to place an order, contact me at: kevin@greatsystems.com