Guiding small teams through project management need not be difficult as we saw yesterday. With proper practice and the right governance and management tools, it can actually turn out to be fun. The cohesiveness in the team though at times can turn out to be destructive, as it may turn out that team members have no clear cut tasks. Most of the times it is expected that the team members are dynamic and have no specific defined roles. In agreement with Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezeos, the size of the team should not be larger that they cannot eat two pizzas to their satisfaction. I agree with this analogy because as soon as the team exceeds this size, decision making may become a nightmare. Not only this, but it also becomes difficult for the team to work within the specified border of governance and project management framework. The nature of it’s size may even at times make the project manager be drawn away from management to performing the actual tasks, leading to vaccum in leadership, which is not the intended purpose. So what do small teams need in order to move forward? 2 things summarize it all as we will see shortly.
Team flexibility: While it is true that having specific roles may not be feasible in such small teams, still the project manager should try as much as possible to have team members assigned specific roles which are they are primarily responsible for. Then within the team, there should be a second team member who is secondarily responsible for the same task. This means that if one person is sick, goes on holiday or quits the company, then the team is still capable pf performing. While staying true to the ideals of BRM, the team lead should aspire to ensure that each member strives to work towards delivering benefit and value for the company. There are two main advantages of this approach, firstly, each team member feels responsible for what they are doing and get a value of appreciation for their work. When members feel valued for what they do, their dedication and focus becomes even great and both the company and the member benefit from get work synergy. Secondly, there is internal growth within the team as members refine their knowledge and expertise in their specific roles and keep the growth tendency on progress. To avoid getting a blurred vision, the project manager while remaining flexible, should still follow the guidelines of project management as defined in PMBOK and ensure that the right processes are followed for initiation, execution and sustainment stages of the project. Flexibility should not be easily mistaken to mean that the project manager should embrace projects with open arms, without any project charter documents that guide the purpose of the project. This in most cases is the number one killer in teams, as team members struggle to understand what they should work on, and what is expected of them in terms of deliver. The PM should ensure that the initial phase of the project follows project management as explained by PMBOK, by receiving the project charter. This should be followed by dissecting the project charter and linking it to what is actually to be done. This step helps to define the scope of the project and gives the project manager to know the capability of the team. For a small team, this means that they don’t have to spend time trying to understand what is expected of them, rather they spend time executing the actual project.
Organization and communication: The team, by nature of its size, should not struggle with communication, or so it would be expected. From my personal experience, I have worked with teams , where communication was dysfunctional to a point of the team almost splitting. This is usually fuelled by poor mindset or incapable leadership to lead the team within the right company governance. Stand-ups, team building and motivating team members should be the mantra of a project management. The the work load of the team becomes easily bearable when team members thrive in a good working environment with good overview of what they are expected to deliver. As we have seen before, with a proper detailed “What to do” document, containing the project components, team members work confidently. There is a sense of security in knowing that there is good organization and guide inexecuting the project to deliver the deliverables within the specified time frame and budget. At times though, the traditional project management requirements may not fit well in mini projects that take roughly a week to complete. In this case, the project manager should devise his own way of managing the project without creating unnecessary overhead, but still ensure that the project does not derail. It may not be realistic for such projects to incoporate all aspects of project management like cost, risk and procurement management as these kind of projects are usually improvement of an existing product.
Since team members will in most cases be contributing to most of the projects, it is importnt that knowledge sharing is encouraged within the team and the manager ensures that the team has a vision which is served. Simple project management tools should at this point be used, to encourage easier, open communication with better transparency. While using project management to deliver the project’s deliverables, the team should regularly undertake sprint planning to ensure that projects are prioritized and executed according to the strategies and goals of the organization.
The bottom line in such small teams is that they should keep things simple but practical without any fear of trying to be innovative. Use the right tools that fit the size of the team and makes the team’s work rate better. The project manager should maintain project ownership and find a good balance between the business requirements of the organization and the available resources at their disposal.
Project Management 