Project Team and Project Manager – Proper Involvement

Do you know what you need to do?

• Are you involving your team equally?

If you are running a project – it implies, you need to deliver a product or a service that is unique in nature within a stipulated time frame with certain quality requirements. For a project manager, getting work done for the customer; requires vigorous exercises like understanding the tasks for which the project has been taken, how to accomplish those tasks, whom to involve, when to involve and many more other activities. For a project to run successfully, you need to share the actual requirements of the same with your stakeholders. It is not advisable to keep all the information restricted to yourself. It is important to be able to communicate with everyone involved in the project from peers, to team members and stakeholders. Everyone needs different information couched in different terms. Have you involved the right person at the right place? Here comes your role as a project manager to involve every team member according to their capabilities.

Now it is always a challenge for the project manager to update everyone about the actual project requirements. But as it is one of the important tasks, you need to initiate it at the initial stage of the project execution for the successful completion of the same. You have to take the initiatives to make it happen in the real project work. Here, you need your entire team to understand the project objective and involve them in the same. This is a skill that is vital to a project manager’s success. Here are some tips to do this!

How will you engage your team members in requirement gathering process?

• The first step in gathering overall requirements of the project is talking with the customer consistently until your understanding about the same is clear. If you find anything ambiguous, try to discuss the same with the customer along with your team members, so that you can clear your doubts and in return you also put a list of requirements for the project. As you have involved your key members, uniformity will be there and everyone would now realize the goal that has to be achieved. Note that this is very imperative for a project manager to understand the requirements of the project goal accurately so that s/he could map out the entire project process and could address other stakeholders in the same manner.

How would you make your team understand the lecture?

• Always use easy and simple language in front of other stakeholders especially to your core team members. If you use difficult terminologies, you are unknowingly moving towards danger zone. It is always good to keep documents in simple language, if possible so that every member of your team understands the document clearly. The ideal way of doing so is using simple English language as this language has a universal acceptance. Another better way is to involve team members in documenting in their own convenient way aligning the project requirements. Overall this documentation should be acceptable to everyone and should be realistic in nature. Here you are performing two good things – (1) Documenting the project in good shape, (2) Effectively involving your team members.

How your team members are busy in their work?

• Do your team members like the project? If not, it is your fault. Try to involve them in project activities. It is always good to involve your team members in decision making and planning activities. The ideal scenario can be involving them while creating work breakdown structure.
• Divide your task as per the requirement in the project. You might need to put more effort for phase 1 whereas you need to put less for phase 2. At times you would need to involve yourself for a particular requirement, ex- to effectively handle the testing phase. You should be able to effectively manage your time so that all phases are efficiently handled. In this regard you need to assign your other senior team members in the phases where you are unable to put more time. This is the ideal way of involving team members. And in the meantime, you could talk with the other team members to know and understand the phase status in order to be in sync with the phase progress.
• Sometimes a project manager assumes that his/her team members understand everything perfectly as per the requirement. But that could be contrary also in some cases. The better way to avoid such incident is – go to their workstation, talk to them and try to understand their way of understanding about the actual requirement of the project. Clear all the doubts if they have.
• Look for an opportunity where you could discuss with all your stakeholders. That can be done through status meetings which could be done daily, weekly or fortnightly. This is very imperative for a project manager to hear at least to the key stakeholders during these status meetings. Be a good listener as sometimes it avoids misunderstandings.

Pradip Dwevedi, PMP is currently the Lead PMP Trainer / Corporate Trainer at Reputed Global REPs, India and also the Head – Project Management at Invida Trans IT Solutions PVT LTD. Prior to this, he was Divisional Manager at Stylo Graphic Imaging and before this he was working as Facilitator/Team Leader at Aptara.