Just a word to expand on the People part of the People-Process-Technology triangle from PPM Fundamentals. Let's start simple: projects are accomplished by project teams. Some projects require multiple teams to work in coordination. Some projects have a static team for years. People working in teams make it all go.
Ok, so when I think about what it takes to make a project team work well, I look back on the projects I've worked on before. I've been on some great projects and some real clunkers. In all of them, I can't think of a single project that turned out well that didn't have a good team of people.
While there is a plenty to explore about the topic of project team effectiveness, let's raise the discussion up a level. When you have a project portfoio with many projects and many teams, the question changes substantially. And to make matters more interesting, most people are on several project teams at the same time. So if you have 1000 people who work on projects, and each person is working on 3 projects (a VERY conservative number in my book), you might very well be looking at managing 3000 teams. And the team configurations are changing constantly.
This simple math begs some questions: Who is responsible for the effectiveness of these teams? How are these teams evaluated? What are the best team configurations? Who performs well in what circumstances? Who performs poorly in what circumstances? How do we create a management environment where team chemistry is constantly being improved?
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