Every project leader wants a dream team that works efficiently to make their work easier. However, when it comes to assembling the right project team, many need help figuring out where to start. It requires careful selection according to the project requirements in order to deliver the desired output in the set timeframe.
In this article, you will find everything you need to know about assembling a good team, its attributes, the challenges you may face, and how to overcome them.
Importance of building a good project team
A good project team allows for an improved working experience and increases the chances of project success. You can experience increased productivity due to better communication and a mix of skills, knowledge, and expertise. Besides, it fosters innovation: according to statistics from TeamStage.io, team building can improve innovation up to 10 times, leading to increased productivity. As a result, you get a diverse working experience with innovative and creative solutions while focusing on shared goals.
What is an effective project team?
When building a team for a project, you may wonder what an effective project team is. While technical requirements vary, there are some general success factors. So, while building a high-performance project team, focus on the following criteria to achieve success:
1. Good communication and support
Every member discusses issues, shares their ideas, and supports their colleagues. With better communication and understanding among team members, the whole project stays on track, and all the deadlines are met.
2. Diversity
It includes every aspect — personalities, ideas, thoughts, skills, experiences, and knowledge. This fosters a resilient, innovative, and creative team that can productively manage any challenge.
3. Continuous development
If everyone is eager to learn, they are more likely to combat changing project and business requirements. Besides, it allows for best practice adoption.
4. Goal-orientation
The overall objective rather than personal achievements should be the top priority across the team to facilitate project success. Otherwise, you risk wasting time and resources and may not achieve the desired output.
5. Accountability
Team members should have a sense of personal responsibility for both successes and failures. This boosts engagement and motivation, which improves the deliverables.
How to assemble a project team to succeed
Want to know how to create a good project team? Building and forming a project team isn't just about picking the best employees. Instead, you must carefully select your available resources regarding the organizational structure and project-specific requirements. So, you must ensure that all requirements are clearly defined before you begin with the steps below on building a team.
1. Consider all the project requirements
A project's success often requires the collaborative work of multiple departments. However, aligning this collaboration may become challenging, as you must carefully plan project stages for every department's specific needs. It's best to think about this in advance, as adding new team members midway through the project may decrease productivity.
2. Plan the technicalities and make sure everyone understands them
Gather the technicalities regarding project requirements and business goals. Define individual rules and document everything so every project stakeholder understands all the details. Achieving goals becomes easier with clear requirements, project planning, and efficient resource utilization.
3. Make the expectations and challenges clear
An effective team can only work with its members, communicating their responsibilities and progress. Thus, you may begin with team meetings, status reports, and department collaboration time.
As you clearly define the project expectations for every milestone, the meetings and reports will be more effective. With employees, team leads, and managers having ground rules and clear boundaries, everyone will work effectively towards achieving their goals.
4. Encourage diversity and welcome all characteristics while building a team
When assembling your team, embrace people from different backgrounds, experience levels, and skills. Apart from technical values, it would help if you welcomed team members of different genders, ages, and races to foster diversity. This helps your team, as everyone can express their point of view, and when those ideas are connected, a much better solution can be derived.
5. Encourage collaboration, not competition
Teams must never include any contest elements. This is because some employees want to win, so they focus more on their personal goals and try to discourage others. It may help them win, but on a larger scale, overall team productivity decreases. So, it would help if you encouraged collaboration where everyone on the team works together to achieve the ultimate goal.
6. Improve the team culture
Team culture involves using a shared vision and having everyone on the same page. Every member accomplishing their smaller milestones contributes towards the main project goal, which requires everyone to put in the effort, and sometimes, it may involve taking risks. Setting such a company culture defines the individual attitude regarding the methods they will use to achieve every project milestone.
7. Maintain good leadership
As a leader, you must make the whole team work together for one unified goal. Better leadership promotes better communication and allows every person to improve their career while enjoying their work for project-specific tasks.
A good leader also looks at their team's weaknesses and tries to combat them by making the most out of the strengths. Most importantly, members must know that if anything goes wrong, the leader will own it and help them find the right solution.
8. Benefit from tools and software
While building your team, you need to leverage the available tools and software. Search for the tools to aid your team building. These may be software to streamline project management, automate deadlines and scheduling, and digitize meetings and communication. With the right tool, you can boost your team with features like notifications, tags, and visual milestone representation.
9. Celebrate success and learn from failure
To assemble a team that succeeds, you need to celebrate every success. Employees and team members need constant motivation, and you can maintain that stream of encouragement with little celebrations for every accomplishment. A celebration may be a recognition of good performance, as such small acts may end up satisfying employees. Failures help identify weaknesses and mistakes to be avoided in the future, which often improves productivity.
10. Value every individual and promote individual growth
Good teams work on project goals while focusing on personal and professional growth. Every team member must be free to learn to excel in their career with the help of the project. As a team leader, you may need to provide training, make members work cross-departments, and hold soft skill workshops. This fuels employee satisfaction, leading them toward achieving the project goals for the team and themselves.
Four challenges when building a project team
While discovering how to build a project team, you should also understand the challenges you may encounter. The top four challenges include:
1. Team conflicts due to communication gaps
Communication gaps due to diversity, where individuals need help understanding others, can lead to conflicts. These conflicts lead to productivity issues, so it is better to resolve communication gaps in earlier stages of team building.
2. Mismanagement of resources
You may need help finding the right people with all the required skills. It gets even more critical when dealing with specialized projects. For example, the solution may be hiring a new person or outsourcing some projects. In both these cases, you spent more resources, like time and money.
3. Unreal deadlines
If you don't plan the project milestones correctly, you may have to deal with product launch delays. The only solution is to plan well from the beginning and set realistic deadlines with margins of error in consideration.
4. Accountability issues and bad rule implementation
There could be severe accountability issues if you don't consider the rules, individual responsibilities, and leadership control for the team. To combat this challenge, you should document everything from the beginning and clarify all the rules.
You must be ready to deal with these challenges when brainstorming how to build an effective project team.
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Dworkz is a software development and UX/UI design company that provides a streamlined project-building experience. With years of expertise, we have an efficient team-building approach, allowing our clients to get their desired web, mobile, and cloud-based solutions timely.
We have an efficient team that designed easy navigation and transparent onboarding processes across Iterate.ai — a platform where startups can connect with enterprises. The success of this solution wouldn't have been possible if every team member wasn't selected with precision.
Dworkz stands for expertise, high engagement, and advanced team-building practices to foster innovation and quality. Are you seeking guidance on team formation or looking for a flexible team to deliver your solution? Let us know the details so we can help you out!
FAQ
Why is assembling a project team essential?
It is essential to build a project team because when individuals with different knowledge bases and skill sets work collaboratively, a huge project can be finished quickly. For an organization, dividing a project into smaller parts and assigning every team member tasks according to their skill set makes the most efficient use of resources. Brainstorming and problem-solving also become better as you assemble project team members.
Which key factors should you keep in mind when building a project team?
To build a successful project team, you must keep the following key factors in consideration:
Plan what you require from the team first
Create clear project team roles with good leadership and responsibilities
Develop clear milestones, rules, and strategy
Know which practical tools and software will benefit
Promote communication and collaboration with a healthy team culture.