Creating a High-Performing Team

Guidelines to Continuously Assess and Refresh Team Skills to Meet Project Needs

When a project first commences, the project manager must have a certain level of awareness of the
knowledge, skills, attributes, and experience needed by the project team to carry out the work and
produce the project’s deliverables.

As the project progresses, the project team and the project manager should gain a better understanding
of customer needs and team capabilities to identify gaps in the team’s skill set.

The project manager needs to coordinate frequent checks for these gaps, and identify appropriate
mechanisms to close those gaps. These may include:

• The identification of new resources needed.

• Training requirements to enable the team to develop the missing skill sets.
• Identification of knowledge gaps that require additional engagement with the customer to
assess needs and modify plans and deliverables as needed.

Guidelines to Maintain Team Knowledge Transfer

A major project challenge is managing knowledge sharing among team members, especially on virtual
teams.

• A core objective is to facilitate collaboration and promote visibility among the team.
• As part of developing a team charter, the team should determine methods for facilitating
knowledge sharing, including frequency of updates, version control, and supporting tools and
the team’s agreed approach to their utilization.
• Agile practices refer to these as information radiators, with the goal of being to create more
seamless visibility into project status across the stakeholder community.
Guidelines to Manage and Rectify Ground Rule Violations

When the team establishes its charter, it sets expectations for the ground rules about how the team is
to operate, and what methods will be used to handle conflicts that occur.

• If there are violations of team’s ground rules, the team and the project manager should assess
opportunities for remediation, or if the violation is so serious as to contemplate the removal and
replacement of an offending team member.
• The team should continue to focus on its core values in these circumstances, including
accountability, shared expectations, and transparency where appropriate.

Guidelines to Participate in Negotiations

While negotiations of a contract are generally handled by the procurement manager, project managers
and project team members will often be engaged throughout the negotiations process. At various points
the project team may be able to suggest or identify:

• Deliverables and milestones.

• Risks and issues.
• Expert judgement about problem definition and solution approaches.
• Practices for how the project will be operated (traditional, waterfall, agile, etc.).
• Resource requirement.

Guidelines to Evaluate Demonstration of Task Accountability

The project manager should determine how task accountability will be tracked and managed. As part of
developing a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), tasks to produce the deliverables should be identified,
preferably by the team members who will be performing the work. When a WBS dictionary (or work
package) is produced, each of the relevant tasks and assignees to produce the deliverable is identified,
tracked, and managed.

In a more agile approach, task identification and tracking is generally handled by the team themselves as
part of iteration planning. Generally, each of the committed user stories for that iteration are
decomposed into the required tasks, which then are tracked and managed by the team using an
information radiator like a Kanban or task board. As work is pulled in for execution, the team member
takes ownership of the tasks and works to complete them. The entire team is accountable for ensuring
that all of the work required in the iteration is performed to deliver the committed stories for that
iteration.

Guidelines to Determine and Bestow Levels of Decision-Making Authority

In general, it is good management practice for decisions to be made at the “right” level. Therefore,
project managers should defer appropriate decisions to the team, while maintaining control and
visibility into the overall plan and progress.

• Tasks should be identified, planned, and managed as much as possible by the team members
themselves. They are the ones closest to the work and will have the best visibility into what
needs to be done to perform the work and deliver the needed results.
• Estimates should be done by the teams performing the work. Especially in teams where a
number of different people are sharing the overall workload, not every team member can
perform a certain amount of work in the same time. Using relative estimates helps the team to
focus on the rough overall level of work without getting too precise on the exact number of
hours it will take; hour estimates may differ widely based on risk, the level of innovation
required, and who will actually be performing that work and their relative skills and experience.
• Empower the teams to drive their own improvement. Techniques like retrospective emphasize
that it is important for project success for the teams to set aside time for their own continual
improvement. The efficiencies teams develop by doing continual improvement far outweigh the
time set aside to do it.

Guidelines to Determine Required Competencies

• What knowledge will be required for this stakeholder to perform as expected with the new
solution?
• What skills or hands-on experience are needed to learn and be able to demonstrate readiness to
carry out work using the solution?
 • What level of buy-in to the solution has been given by the stakeholder, and what aspects of the
training need to be employed to help develop support for the solution?
• What modalities of training should be offered, and what are the relative costs of different
approaches?

Guidelines to Ensure Training Occurs

Scheduling and resourcing the training is only the first step. Some other actions might include:

• Create awareness among the stakeholders about available training.

• Be sure to create invitations to attend the training.
• Engage with customer management to obtain their buy-in and commitment for their employees
to attend the training programs.
• When people register to attend the training, they should receive a registration confirmation
notice and a reminder prior to the training event to ensure they have not forgotten.
• Rosters should be created for each delivery of the training, and signatures captured to confirm
attendance and participation in any pre- or post-assessments.

Guidelines to Implement Options for Virtual Team Member Engagement

Key guidelines for implementing effective virtual teams include:

• Focus on collaboration and team norms before focusing too much on tools. Have them figure
out how and why they need to communicate and collaborate with one another, then look at
how technologies and tools can help.
• Recognize that team formation in a virtual environment is difficult, so it’s crucial to reinforce the
teams’ mutual commitments, achievements, and opportunities.
• Virtual teams will require a significant amount of feedback and reinforcement of the team goals
and objectives, or it will quickly devolve to individual behavior and performance instead of the
team’s shared goals.
• When possible, provide opportunities for the virtual team members to meet in person, build
relationships, have fun together, and nurture their shared commitment to the project’s goals.
Guidelines to Continually Evaluate the Effectiveness of Virtual Team Member Engagement

To evaluate the effectiveness of virtual team member engagement:

• Track the progress of your teams as they carry out the work and produce deliverables.
I. Is the team prioritizing communications and visibility for the other team members?
II. Listen for blockers or other potential issues that team members may be uncomfortable
discussing.
III. Look for clues in body language or tone of voice that indicate potential unshared
concerns.
• Ensure meetings like daily standups are not just status updates, but value commitments from
the team to itself.
I. Is the team on track?
II. Is there anything that may compromise the team’s objectives this iteration?
III. Encourage project managers or agile coaches to step back from the group to ensure that
the team is actually recommitting to itself each day that they are on track to meet their
goals.
• Using videoconferencing tools.
I. A picture (and body language) is really worth a thousand words.
II. Connecting face-to-face with team members on a daily basis is important to reinforce
progress or raise issues and attack them before they can compromise the team’s goals.
• Timebox your meetings. All the best practices of effective meetings apply.
I. Have a clear agenda, objectives, and an approach to running the meeting.
II. Identify the attendees who are needed to meet the objectives, the outputs, and action
items for the team.
III. Adjourn promptly when done.
Guidelines to Reach Consensus and Support the Outcome of the Parties’ Agreement

The techniques covered in this topic are useful in helping your teams assess alternatives and make
decisions. Some specific guidelines include:

• Having a team charter is enormously helpful here as it may specify how a team chooses to
handle certain scenarios and disagreement when they arise. For example, where team
members disagree about the number of story points to estimate for a particular user story, the
team charter may designate that the team will use the higher estimate, or that majority vote
rules.
• In general, it is preferable to seek consensus among the team where possible, and to recognize
that sometimes it will not be possible.
• For those times when consensus is not possible, it is helpful to have an agreed approach in
advance.