The #1 Important factor in teamwork (According to the Experts)

Every project managers have their own ways to deal with their team. The content below was collected from the 2 professional IT project managers. Let’s discuss and share knowledge together here! :)

Terry Woodward

About the Interviewee: Terry Woodward, who has been a Corporate Project Manager, a Director of Data Services and a Development Manager for SOF Inc., with the total 30 years of Tech experiences. (Visit Terry’s LinkedIn here).

I’ve found that a team works best together when the full context of the project is known from the beginning. This serves a dual purpose of aligning motivation and engaging the creativity of the team to meet the overarching goal as the project involves.

I was managing a software project for a startup company in a mid-sized city and had an experience that illustrates this well.

We had a small in-house development team to work on prototypes and maintenance of the early product and the first round investors wanted the company to engage a large development firm in a major city to do a larger scale build-out.

I talked to the in-house team to explain that we had three things going on with the upcoming development changes.

• One — we were trying to satisfy the initial investors with the build-out out approach we were using so we could position for the next funding round.
• Two — we had the need to continue to demo the system to build additional customer interest.
• Three — we should have a contingency plan if the next funding round doesn’t come through.

With this context available to the team, one of the in-house developers came forward with an idea to couple our existing system to an already available back-end framework we could purchase. This would make us able to continue to roll out customer facing features, even though the larger build was just getting underway with an external company.

We adopted this idea and it turned out to be highly beneficial because the startup company didn’t succeed with the next funding round due to larger industry economic factors unexpectedly coming into play, but were able to fall back to the scaled back system without missing a beat. The reason of this is the creative foresight that the context brought to the decision-making process.

Carrie Leder Nunemaker

About the Interviewee: Carrie Leder Nunemaker is a project manager at Arkansas Supreme Court, who has more than 8 years of experiences as an IT project manager. (Visit Carrie’s LinkedIn here).

Teamwork is the number one thing I stress to my team members. Everyone on the project needs to understand the project objectives and their role on the team.

At the same time, team members need to understand that, as the project manager, I have expectations of the team working together to accomplish our goals. Working together means more than being friendly to each other at the water cooler or letting a colleague know when a preceding task is complete.

Working together could require a project manager to start connecting servers and patching cables during an implementation. It could mean a programmer helps pull cabling when the infrastructure team is behind.

As a team we will support each other to accomplish the goals and objectives set within the project charter.

In past projects, I have specifically run into issues with lead programmers feeling they must shoulder the largest portion of the work and believing that to ask for help would equate to failure.

The first step to overcoming these perceptions is to work with programmers to identify the signs that they are becoming overwhelmed. Once they identify the signs, I work on helping them understand that their insistence to personally complete work rather than ask for help or delegate work can lead to the project being in jeopardy. Once they have accepted that asking for help is not a failure of the process, but a success, I begin to educate them on the proper ways to delegate work.

Delegating work to another team member isn’t always easy.

The delegation process itself can take time if done correctly. This is often why people would rather do the work themselves.

However, when done properly it can be a powerful tool. The person delegating should work with the project manager to determine the proper resource within the team, or in some situations, outside of the project team.

The person receiving the delegated work should be given clear expectations regarding the work they are being asked to complete.

Investing time in the delegation process will lead to a significantly better outcome than simply tossing an assignment on a co-workers desk.

The final component is teaching team members to provide direct and honest feedback to each other. While the project manager can certainly be relied upon to help settle disputes regarding assignments or provide feedback, the team is infinitely better when the members can provide honest critiques of each other’s work and settle their own disagreements without fear of recrimination.

Strong teams create a momentum that is unrivaled. Investing in team members and helping them hone their skills to be better teammates can pay huge dividends over time. While the skills and relationships are not developed quickly, using the right techniques to encourage these behaviors will improve the speed at which the team excels.

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