Leading Project Teams
Planning is an unnatural process; it is much more fun to do something. The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.
— (Sir John Harvey-Jones)
When firms want to innovate or make changes they often set up a project team to produce recommendations. Examples include the development of a new service; the introduction of a new information technology system; modifications to the remuneration arrangements; fresh ways of seeking feedback from clients; a new staff development policy; changes to the performance review scheme; an office move; or an improved information database. Many professional assignments for clients may also be regarded as projects. The teams are usually made up of people from different departments who collectively bring a wide range of experience and expertise to the matter in hand. Although many of the attributes and tasks of an effective project team leader are the same as those required in leading a permanent team of professionals, there are also some important differences. This chapter is written to help those who find themselves, temporarily, in the role of project leader.
There are a few characteristics that are common to all projects. They have clearly defined objectives, success can be judged, they have definite timescales and they are unique although there may be similarities to other assignments. Because the individuals who comprise the team are usually drawn from different departments and have their regular day-to-day responsibilities to attend to, project leaders need considerable skill in holding the team together and delivering results. It is very easy for project team members, however well intentioned at the start, to neglect the project work in favour of undertaking their day-to-day professional tasks. The problem is sometimes compounded by the tacit or, in some cases, overt support for such behaviour from the regular professional service team leaders. Projects, because they are often concerned with innovation and change, are, by definition, important. A useful task for project team leaders at the outset is to get commitment from individual project team members to provide an agreed amount of regular time to the project. This commitment is likely to relate to time for individual contributions to the project as well as for attending project meetings. Awise project leader will also make it clear to the project sponsor and to the leaders of those professional service teams from which the project team members are drawn that he or she is only willing to lead the project if time commitments are given, honoured and supported by everyone concerned.
John Cridland, Deputy Director-General, describes the challenges for project leaders at the Confederation of British Industry:
We have two sorts of projects. Some are concerned with changes to our work processes and others are set up to provide a multidisciplinary approach to policy work. One of our major difficulties is getting people trained in different disciplines to work together effectively. For example, we need some of our economists and some of our lawyers to work alongside each other on competition matters. The economists are there to provide a macro view. Because there are also micro legal issues at stake, then lawyers need to be involved as well. We do find quite often that, because of the very different training involved and the different assumptions that follow, there is a gap in communications and understanding. One way round the problem is to have generalists in the project team, and indeed the project leaders may well be generalists, to act as translators. They may help the team to develop an independent way of looking at issues. One way is through mind mapping or treating the problems in logical tree cause-and-effect terms. It is rather as though you have a group of people, some of whom speak one language and others who speak another, and the only way that they communicate with each other is by speaking Esperanto. Another example is a project team concerned with the communication of intellectual property to members through the provision of electronically based summaries. Educationalists and environmental experts, for instance, may find it difficult to agree with media specialists on the ways summaries of information should be written. The generalists on the team can often provide the way through.
Our policy advisers work in dedicated professional teams for most of their time. This poses a problem when we want them to contribute to multidisciplinary project work. There are two difficulties. People tend to be tribal and given half a chance prefer to stay rooted in their regular teams. When there is a conflict of priorities the dedicated teams tend to win out. Another problem is the balance of power. There is a tendency for the leaders of dedicated teams to require that their work takes priority. It is rather like the England football team losing out to the clubs because the clubs will not cooperate sufficiently with release for training and the provision of rest time. The clubs have the greater power so they put their interests first.
We have some solutions. Sometimes, if the project is critical enough, we can allocate people to it on a full-time basis for a short period of time. This is easier with policy advice than with organizational change projects. Another way is for the dedicated team leaders to constitute a project team and to use their own team members to undertake work for the project on a subcontracted basis. Most important of all, however, is to create a culture, which we are in the process of doing, where projects are seen as sufficiently important. We are now strengthening projects by giving them an appealing brand identity, a proper budget, including an analysis of the opportunity costs involved in working on projects rather than on regular activities, and by giving organizational backing to project sponsors and leaders to exercise more clout over the use of resources.