You know how it goes, you’re in the final stages of your project. Getting close to cutover and go-live planning is fully in progress. The stakes are high. Timing is everything, checking and re-checking, communicating with the key stakeholders, the tension is mounting …. and then…someone notices the “assumptions”. That’s the part when everyone else thought someone else was covering a particular task or topic. Whoa – no one actually has it. It’s right about now the proverbial tensions can really escalate. Questions get asked, fingers get pointed, temperatures rise or “re-wind you got this” because it’s a great team and everyone has everyone else’s back and is there for each other and the project and the near miss turns into a – “caught it just in time moment”.
So what went right? Actually, humans went right. It was down to being able to understand how to select the team in the first place – the one which who will move toward success from the get go. From our experience at SafetySuite there’s some things we consider as essentials when building that High Performing Project Team.
If you’re part of an organisation which is planning the project, working on a Project implementation is also a showcase for discovering organisational talent and an opportunity for trying out your skills in a new situation. It’s a chance to learn about yourself as much as the organisation and the solution you are implementing.
A customer recently shared with me that in her capacity as a Project manager she sees herself as the mid point of the Venn diagram. I love her analogy. She understands all of the elements that bring a project to life and sees herself connecting each of them.
Using that feedback from one of many of our customers and looking at our own experience we have found the following capabilities enrich a project team and add to the human elements you want to get right. These are the elements we put into our mix of the essentials. We’re not putting them in any particular order of priority, just putting them out there for consideration. We’re quite sure you’ll have more to add to this list too.
Collaboration
Attention to Detail
Communication
Time Management
Adaptability
Project management
Problem solving
Business process understanding
Conflict resolution
Data Analysis
Customer focus
Change Management
Leadership
Risk management
At the end of the day, it's more than great tech, we want to ensure we have happy End Users, reliable processes and practices and a stable environment for the organisation to thrive. We can see this list has potentially many more capabilities that could be included, yet time & again these ones present as key to the glue that keeps the team working toward success
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