The Role of Project Teams
Discuss about the Research & Reflective Paper on Team Project for Team Values.
The project teams include various roles like project manager, business analysts, subject matter experts and other stakeholders. For a project, the project manager is assigned and under him, a Project team is assigned. Project team refers to a group of members. The project manager gives clear directions for them to follow and the project team is held responsible to execute the tasks and to produce the deliverables that are outlined in the project plan and in the schedule. However, irrespective of their participation, the project team may and may not be included in the project’s full life cycle.
The objective of this research is to reflect the experiences on “Project team” along with their values and regulations to be followed and performed. The values learnt in a project by the researcher will be identified and analyzed. The related concepts and models which relate to a project management will be focused. Further, important insights from the learning of the researcher will be discussed, like team member dynamics, team composition and process. The research will review and examine the importance of team values, team bonding and team working relationship. Finally, a detailed learning analysis will be undertaken.
The project significance includes the introduction of the project, interoperability, the benchmarks and contribution for meeting the demands of the project, project related content and access, followed by the need of the Project at present and what the project tries to do (Dlib.indiana.edu, 2018) (Melbourne Law School, 2018).
Aims: Aims refers to a statement which represents the required outcomes of the research, to be accomplished (Erm.ecs.soton.ac.uk, 2018). My Project’s aim was to evaluate the managerial knowledge and skills required for a project manager.
Objectives: Objectives refer to a set of subordinates for the defined aim (Erm.ecs.soton.ac.uk, 2018). My Project’s objectives were to develop strategies, competencies including indigenous cultural competence, for effective managerial behavior.
I had experience as a team member in the research on project management, where the tasks were divided among the team members. The aim acts as the purpose of the study, which is defined clearly in a short form, whereas, the objectives comprises of the steps that must be answered to the question of the research. First, the aim is defined and then the objectives. Aims can be two to three, but the objectives must be comparatively more in number. The project’s aims and objectives are significant areas which help the readers to know the purpose of the project and for the researcher to stay on the track.
Objectives and Aims
The main problem was where to start the research and what are the necessary requirements for evaluating the managerial knowledge and skills of an individual.
Description:
I decided to work with my team members on this problem and our research lead us to Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument which effectively assesses an individual’s behaviour, in conflict struck circumstances. Because, a project manager must effectively handle conflicts.
Team Dynamics which Worked and Why?
The Team dynamics is essential in a team as it help to build motivation and increases the driving forces which pushes the team members toward their target (Tolstoy and Karenina, 2018). The team dynamics which worked for us in our project includes:
- Identifying an apt leader
- Establishing roles and responsibilities
- Discussing each other’s results or work, on a fixed date, time and place.
- Establish a set of goals and objectives.
- Deadlines for completion the defined tasks.
Insights to be carried into the Future Projects
I wish to carry all the above mentioned team dynamics, as they are the basic elements and are highly essential aspects to be followed by the team members. These team dynamics will benefit to discipline the team members.
Key Team Dynamics which Impacted Team’s Performance
Positive Key Team Dynamics:
The key team dynamic which helped our team includes (Hale, 2012):
Direct communication, where no one is dominating and allows all the team members to both talk and listen. This created high interaction and energy for the team.
The negative team dynamics is individual contribution, because in a team all must work as a team with their available skills and knowledge. The individual contribution was not effective when compared to a successful communication patterns in a team.
Team dynamics worked well for us due to our leader’s leadership qualities like integrity, cooperation, letting the team speak and focusing on the target (Briantracy.com, 2018). Moreover, decision-Making Capabilities, accountability of all the team member and empathy has helped to manage the above mentioned key team dynamics (Hasan, 2017).
The key learning outcomes includes:
- The leader must be selected wisely based on his or her leadership qualities.
- The knowledge of each team member is important and beneficial for the team, which must be heard and discussed with the other team members.
- Both team and individual performance go hand-in-hand, in a team dynamics (Myers, 2013).
- Team dynamics refer to certain forces which takes place unconsciously and psychological influences to direct the team’s behaviour and performance (Myers, 2013).
- Energetic participation of the team plays a vital role (Williams, 2017).
- Roles of the team must be defined clearly (Villanovau.com, 2018).
- The team must be made aware on the aim and deadline of the project, to work effectively.
- The team members are required to put their individual responsibilities, to increase the performance of the project (IT Portfolio Management, 2018).
- It is necessary to have cooperation between the team members for working effectively on the project and it discards conflicts too (Inloox.com, 2018).
- However, the pre-existing friendship could create strong impact on all the team member, either in a positive or a negative way (Sqa.org.uk, 2018).
Aspects which Worked Well:
The one aspect which mainly worked for our team is diverse team members. As, diversity helped to get new ideas for the project.
It is observed from various researches that a team which is more diverse tends to perform better when compared to a team whose team members are more homogenous (Mumford, 2012) (Coursera, 2018).
Aspects which Didn’t Work so Well:
However, the other aspect of the diversity is social process which impacted on our performance. The social processes can disrupt the team, if the team is not established well. This aspect lead to loss of productivity in the beginning. Because, it takes time for people to know each other, resolve their conflicts and have proper communication. Initially, this factors impacted by dividing our team into sub groups.
Values Learnt in Project Management
According to my weekly progress reports I am good at interacting with people, this quality of mine will help to gel well with the diverse team members. Finally, it will result in development of effective social processes in less time.
The team composition is necessary factor which has to be focused. In our team, we experienced team composition diversity which helped us to get ideas only after developing social processes among the team members. Prior to social process like open communication, it was difficult to know what is happening and where the project is directed. Moreover, our team was sub divided among ourselves based on understandings. This was a threat for the team and its productivity.
From the analysis, it is understood that the team composition diversity must interact with various types of social processes in a way that the teams could capitalize on the benefits of diversity, only if they engage in effective social processes like, “Open communication”, which was not carried out in the initial stage of our project.
According to Reiter-Palmon, Wiger and de Vreede, any team must provide tools which facilitates the social processes like effective leadership and training. This will allow to realize the team composition diversity’s positive effects (Mumford, 2012).
The empirical work is conducted and its impact of team cognition on the creativity and innovation of the team is projected. When the individual cognitive processes are researched, the research has observed that creativity and innovation dominates more. The authors consider team cognition as new interest which is been related with team composition. Various important points emerge from the research such as- Team cognitive processes are concentrated on the social cognition; then, there exists interrelation between the team cognitive processes’ various dimensions; Time could play a vital role on these cognitive processes; The team cognitive processes could influence, it can get influenced and can interact with the team social processes; and the team cognitive processes could mediate or moderate the association among the team composition, team creativity and team innovation.
Generally, the cognitive processes are linked with the skills like creative problem solving, For example, the natural progressions like idea generation, problem construction and evaluation and selection of idea.
The results of various researches show that the team which is more diverse tends to perform better, when compared to the team whose team members are more homogenous.
Even according to (Zarzu, Scarlat and Falc?o?lu, 2013), team composition is identified as an important factor which has influence on the performance of the team. The same view is shared by Senior, (1997) and Belbin, (2002). Further, the team composition is said that it not just questions what the individuals of the team bring to the group. For instance, skill, experience, ability, role and so on. Instead, it also questions whether the capabilities of these individuals when combined could increase the performance of the team, as a whole or not. Here the authors have concentrated on reviews of various research papers, which concentrates on size of the team, combined characteristics of the members and member heterogeneity.
Team Member Dynamics
It is possible to operationalize the team diversity in various methods like, average of the construct across team members and highest scoring team members. These operationalizations might direct towards diverse results related to the impact of diversity. For instance, the team which comprises of members who have high creativity could perform better. However, the cognitive style, diversity in styles was correlated with creativity
Therefore, the “team composition” contains a complex combination of member attributes.
The selected concept is team composition diverse. For our team members, the team composition diversity supported in the later stage of the project, to gain new ideas for the project.
This is because, the diverse team members had no close interaction before the formation of team. Each one of them were unique and it took a while to understand each other and their perspectives towards their recommended ideas. The results of various researches on team refers that more diverse members tends to perform better when compared to a team whose team members are more homogenous. This is a concept which must be looked carefully, as the point is true but it might take some time to see the actual results. Thus time plays a role here. The other aspect of the diversity is social process, which impacted on our performance. The social processes surely disrupted our team and thus if the team is not established well it is difficult to get productive results.
Moreover, it was mentioned that this very aspect lead our team to productivity loss, in the beginning. Time plays the following role- time is needed to understand and gel with the team members for coordination. Coordination will help to cooperate with each other which is very important for any productive team. This can also discard any conflicts or misunderstanding of an individual’s characteristics. The team leader can know the skills and capabilities of the individuals during the social processes and utilize this event to define the roles and responsibilities of each team members.
Our team initially was impacted with division of the team into sub groups. If the social processes like open communication takes place this division can be eliminated. As a whole communication, cooperation, accountability, individual’s skills and other attributes play a major role in a team. The responsibility of the team leader is high here, as “team composition” is complicated, which comprises of complex combination of member attributes.
The levels of conceptualization, measurement, and analysis are ignored for team composition, in many research papers. This is important as the considerable usage of averaging the additive models for guiding aggregation of individual characteristics, for the team level could suggests a very limited conceptualization of the compositional construct at the higher level (Orgcom14.hciresearch.org, 2018).
Team Composition and Process
What combination of team member’s attribute can work well is highly critical to understand and hence it must be articulated carefully. At the team level, a well-defined models of emergence must guide the representation of individual-level characteristics. Certain theoretical research have developed models for skills, knowledge and abilities that are necessary for the individuals in the team. However, the results of the association is still unknown. The reason for such complexity is problem to find the samples which has adequate number of teams, and the next reason is that the concentration is mainly on the team and not on the team members.
The new learning which will influences the researcher in future includes:
- Team composition is essential but a complicated and the results vary.
- For a project, provide and gather information by getting feedbacks for project planning.
- Based on the effective planed designed work on the project.
- Define the roles and responsibilities according to the skills and capabilities of the individuals present in the team.
- Make sure to analyze the processes and carry out documentation as and when required. This will help the project in a long run and also benefit in the future projects.
- Provide the required social processes for the team.
- Share the status of the Project with the team.
- Increase collaboration of work with the other team members, for meeting the project’s goals and objectives.
Conclusion
The experiences of the research on “Project team” along with their values and regulations to be followed and performed are studied. The related concepts and models which relate to a project management are concentrated. Then, the important insights from the learning of the researcher are discussed.
It is observed that the aim acts as the purpose of the study, which is defined clearly in a short form and the objectives comprises of steps which must be answered to the research questions.
The research examines the importance of team values, team bonding and team working relationship. It is determined that team composition is a complicated combination of member attributes. Thus, the concepts of project management, team member dynamics, team composition and process are reported. Finally, a detailed learning analysis is undertaken.
Team composition is a concern of many due to its diverse results. Complicated insights are discussed, where the reason for complexity in team composition is regarded as, the problem to find the samples which has adequate number of teams, and the next reason is that the concentration is mainly on the team and not on the team members.
An appropriate academic theory is discussed and insights are extracted from it. At last, the new learning are listed.
References
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Coursera. (2018). 4.- Team Composition, Part 1. [online] Available at: https://www.coursera.org/learn/managing-people-iese/lecture/1vhst/4-team-composition-part-1 [Accessed 24 May 2018].
Dlib.indiana.edu. (2018). I. Significance of the Project. [online] Available at: https://www.dlib.indiana.edu/projects/sounddirections/projectDoc/admin/NEHNarrativeWebsite.pdf [Accessed 24 May 2018].
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Hasan, S. (2017). Top 10 Leadership Qualities That Make Good Leaders. [online] TaskQue. Available at: https://blog.taskque.com/characteristics-good-leaders/ [Accessed 24 May 2018].
Inloox.com. (2018). What is a project team?. [online] Available at: https://www.inloox.com/project-management-glossary/project-team/ [Accessed 24 May 2018].
IT Portfolio Management. (2018). Project team. [online] Available at: https://uwaterloo.ca/it-portfolio-management/methodologies/roles-and-responsibilities/project-team [Accessed 24 May 2018].
Melbourne Law School. (2018). Project Significance. [online] Available at: https://law.unimelb.edu.au/centres/clen/research/supermarket-project/about/significance [Accessed 24 May 2018].
Mumford, M. (2012). Handbook of Organizational Creativity. 1st ed. Academic Press.
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Myers, S. (2013). Team Dynamics – how they affect performance. [online] Teamtechnology.co.uk. Available at: https://www.teamtechnology.co.uk/team/dynamics/overview/ [Accessed 24 May 2018].
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Sqa.org.uk. (2018). Team Dynamics. [online] Available at: https://www.sqa.org.uk/e-learning/ProjMan03CD/page_15.htm [Accessed 24 May 2018].
Tolstoy, L. and Karenina, A. (2018). 10 team dynamics of high performance. [online] mikecardus.com. Available at: https://mikecardus.com/10-team-dynamics-that-all-great-teams-share/ [Accessed 24 May 2018].
Villanovau.com. (2018). Project Team Roles and Responsibilities. [online] Available at: https://www.villanovau.com/resources/project-management/project-team-roles-and-responsibilities/#.WwX8odSFNdh [Accessed 24 May 2018].
Williams, K. (2017). What Is Team Dynamics?. [online] LIVESTRONG.COM. Available at: https://www.livestrong.com/article/354170-what-is-team-dynamics/ [Accessed 24 May 2018].
Zarzu, C., Scarlat, C. and Falc?o?lu, P. (2013). Team Composition and Team Performance: Achieving Higher Quality Results In an International Higher Education Environment. Management, Knowledge and learning International Conference, 19(21).
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