Having got so far that a final project plan has been approved, the project team for performing the project has to be settled. This chapter deals with

• Recruiting a project team
• Organizing and managing a project team.

Before you proceed, please read chapter 5, pp. 195-235, of the textbook (Wysocki 2009).

Recruiting a project team

The first question is: who is settling the project teams. Wysocki (2009) differentiates between project managers and functional managers: The project manager’s task is to finish a project in time, within the budget, and with the expected results in terms of quality and quantity. The functional manager is responsible for the staff.

In big project, this differentiation works fine. The project manager can rather be considered as a project coordinator. E.g., in a big EC research project, the project coordinator will not influence the staff decisions of each partner. However, the differentiation gets vaguer, the smaller the projects are.

According to Wysocki (2009), three components of a project team have to be recruited:

1. The project manager is the very important person in a project team and one of the persons, who are most difficult to replace. Therefore, a project manager has to be selected quite carefully. The profile of an “ideal project manager” includes the following competencies, skills, and other aspects:

1. The project manager has to have time. Quite often, project managers are engaged in several projects. However, a general rule of thumb is that a project manager is only able to manage one big project at a time in an appropriate quality.
2. Hiring a project manager, who is managing a project for the first time and performs project management via “learning by doing” is risky. At least bigger projects should be handed to experienced project managers.
3. Project managing requires strategic thinking. A manager has to have an overview of the overall project results and the environment of the project, e.g., business outcomes.
4. A project manager has to have two competencies, which might contradict in some cases: leadership and interpersonal competencies.
5. There is no need that project manager has the technical expertise to be able to fulfill all tasks on his/her own. But he/she must be capable of understanding (more or less) what the staff members are doing and he/she must be able to judge the (intermediate) results.
6. Quite often, something goes wrong in a project. A project manager has to be flexible and creative in order to solve problems.
7. Too often read in job adverts, but still true: Ability to work under pressure.
8. Before you proceed, please have a look at the required profiles of project managers in several job offers.
   • Job offer 1
   • Job offer 2
   • Job offer 3
   • Job offer 4
   • Job offer 5

2. The core team members are basically those who are doing the work. According to Wysocki (2003), there are the following criteria for selecting the staff:

1. Commitment to the project and the project team
2. Ability to share equally success and failure with the project team
3. Flexibility
4. Task- and result-orientedness
5. Ability to work within schedule and constraints
6. Willingness to give trust and support
7. Teamwork capability
8. Open-mindedness
9. Ability to work within given team structures
10. Ability and willingness to use project management tools.

3. A contracted team might be a solution, if your own resources are not sufficient. However, this is risky. Risk factors are, for example:

1. Lacking expertise
2. Lacking resources
3. Lacking commitment to the project and project results
4. Lacking internal management

In order to minimize the risks, engaging an external team bases on detailed requests for information, requests for proposals or requests for quotes, and carefully designed contracts.

Organizing and managing a project team

If you are the project manager, there is only one person responsible for the failure of a project: YOU. (Which is a bit different in case of success: “Success has many fathers.”) Nobody will be interested in hearing that your core staff member was sick for 2 months or a company did not deliver an urgently required data set in time. You will be the only one who gets crucified.

One reason for failure might be that you did a bad job. Another reason might be that you were not able to do a good job, because you had not the authority to do so. A classical example is a matter of hierarchies: In a company, several staff members are employed on the same hierarchical level. Suddenly, one of them becomes the project manager. If he/she is not empowered to tell the colleagues “Do this in a different way”, the lacking authority will cause severe problems. Before you start to take over the project management, try to clarify your position, and if you do not have the authority for decisions, keep away from this job.

Based on individual learning styles, project team members will have different roles and ways of working in a team. According to Wysocki (2009), there are four types:

• Assimilators
• Divergers
• Accommodators
• Convergers

Typically, a project manager will not be in the lucky position of having a balanced project team covering all these capabilities. But he/she has to be aware of the types of the individual team members and deal with it.

Once the project team is established, the project manager has to define rules how the project team operates. According to Wysocki (2003), there are six general situations, when operating rules are required:

1. Problem solving requires an organized procedure on how to achieve a solution.
2. Decision making can be made by an “order of the boss”, a “democratic group process”, or by a mixture of both: The project manager consults the project team, but the final decision is up to the project manager.
3. The project manager has to keep a fine balance when it comes to conflicts. Conflicts are normal, and talking about conflicts has to be allowed. But the project manager has to avoid a situation where team members are looking for confrontation. Solving conflicts should be a collaborative process, e.g., in team meetings.
4. Consensus building is similar to decision making: Processes can be top-down, bottom-up, or a mixture of both.
5. Brainstorming is a classical tool for dealing with new and complex issues in a heterogeneous group. The goals are to collect the ideas and know-how of the group, to structure and input, and to achieve a common understanding of what the issue is about. We will deal with brainstorming in more detail later in this course.
6. Team meetings are essential tools for steering a project (see section 1 of this module).

Communication

A core issue of project management is to organize communication, internal and external. You will also have to organize communication in part II of this course. The following communication channels have to be organized:

1. Personal meetings are scheduled and organized on various levels – from bilateral meetings to meetings of the entire project team and project requesters.
2. Virtual meetings (video conferences, telephone conferences (e.g., via Skype), online-rooms) must be organized and facilitated.
3. Email communication requires an email list.
4. And most important: Where are the documents of the project stored? In which version? Who is allowed to (or obliged to) work on a document at which time?