Project Team Optimization

A well organized and functioning project team can accomplish your business objectives with little pain or disruption. However, even the most carefully selected teams can run into major problems that can impact the prospective success of an entire initiative. Teams of people who may never have worked together before are thrown together and asked to deliver under tight timelines and within a “high pressure” environment.

The symptoms of a poorly functioning team are obvious: shift of blame, not talking the same language, behind schedule, over budget, etc… You simply cannot afford the risk. Whether your project team is in disarray, or you just want to obtain even higher results, our expert consultants can help.

How We Can Help

If you are looking for a project team that delivers the best results our senior advisors and project managers can help. With over 3 decades of experience, we have helped hundreds of teams and initiatives become more effective in obtaining their desired business results. Using our proprietary tools, we can evaluate the dynamic of any project team and provide recommendations for improvement.

We dig deep into the root causes underpinning a poorly functioning team, drawing on a range of best practice techniques to identify the key issues and their relevance and – most importantly – to highlight specific strategies that can be used to help you develop a high performing project team.

For many such project teams, this will require a transformative approach. It is not enough to know about the tools and techniques of developing a high performing project team; the ability to apply these in practice and achieve successful business outcomes often requires extensive changes in both the “art and science” of project management. Accordingly, we can provide custom developed project management tools to help your Project Manager ensure team cohesion and progress.

Additionally, if you are looking for that missing team member, our vast database of seasoned professionals allows us to help you select exactly the right one for your team.

Key Considerations

Questions to Ask

  • Do we have a conscious awareness and understanding of the nature of effective team dynamics and optimization?
  • What are the current methods / ways we select members of a project team? Do we only look at the hard qualities and credentials a candidate has or take into consideration the softer “art” skills?
  • How do our project teams generally fair? What is the percentage of our projects that get completed on time and on budget?
  • Do we have a post-project assessment policy in place?
  • How do we keep track of the success of our projects / alignment with our organizational strategy? Are we improving?

Thoughts to Consider

  • Effective project team functioning and the benefits the project team can offer is an important first stage in transforming an organization to deliver real business benefits.
  • Trust is the cornerstone of project team functioning and arguably one of the greatest assets a well-functioning project team can have. But this is often overlooked: typically project managers focus too much on the “science” of assembling the correct mix of skills on the project team and not enough on the “art” of dealing with project team members and their needs, which include developing trust-based relationships.
  • Studies have shown that as many as 95% of team members said that good communication was the reason for their success. Over 95% said that poor communication was the reason for their failures. Clearly communication appears to be one of the keys to project success.
  • In a rapidly evolving business environment in which the ability to quickly develop effective transformation project team functioning is fast becoming one of the main differentiators between organizations that thrive and grow and those who fall behind.

There are many benefits to a strong and coherent project team including:

  • Higher project success rates; accomplishing the true goals of transformation
  • Less headache and chaos within the organization and among both project and business management
  • Greater project efficiency and less resource waste
  • The ability to accomplish more with less; allowing excess resources to be invested in additional places
  • Longer-lasting results which takes into consideration corporate culture and employee viewpoints

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