C11PA – Project Management

Week 4

Gowrie Vinayan
Malaysia
Shai Davidov & Nilakshi Galahitiyawe
Edinburgh
Ashraf Rouf
Dubai

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Project Teams &
Leadership
Aim of this module

To understand the process of

To recognize and understand
creating the project team and
the significance of teams in in
the importance of virtual teams
project management.
in contemporary organizations

To recognize some of the

To gain an awareness of the
dysfunctional aspects of teams
stages of team development
and barriers to their
and group dynamics
development

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PMBOK(Project Management
Body of Knowledge) processes
and knowledge areas

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PMBOK processes in Teams management

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 Why teams?
• Synergy
• More input leads to better ideas and decisions
• More responsive
• More effective
• Greater depth of expertise
• Synergy through complementary skills
• Greater implementation of new ideas
• Improved Communication
• Wider circle of communication and expertise
• Increased learning
• Information sharing
• Personal Satisfaction
• Sense of security to take risks
• Develop with support of team members
6**Synergy is the creation of a whole that is greater than the simple sum of its parts. The term synergy comes from the Attic Greek word συνεργία synergia from synergos,
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συνεργός, meaning "working together
Groups and Teams
Group Team

•Loose association • Tighter Association

•Some common purpose • Share Common Objectives
•Similarity • Joint Responsibility
• Need to collaborate
• Have an array of skills

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Effective Project Team
• A clear sense of mission
• A productive interdependency
• Cohesiveness
• Trust
• Enthusiasm
• Results orientation
• Mutual support

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Effective Project Team
• Complementary Skills
– Multidisciplinary
– Create synergy 2+2=5
– distribution of tasks - better efficiency

• Common Purpose
– Clear Project Mission
– Widely understood and agreed

• Mutually Accountable
– Accept responsibility
– Non blame attitude
Bloke from
Mars • Trust
– Appreciate capabilities

• Motivation
– Energetic, Enthusiastic
– Winners

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Building the team 1. Identify the skills required to achieve the project
objectives
2. Identify people who match the skill set
• Internal or external to the organisation
3. Meet with potential members to ensure
commitment
4. Negotiate for potential team members
• How long are they required?
• What are the alternatives to the preferred
member?
• What happens in special circumstances?
• Non availability and Partial availability
5. Assemble the project team

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 The flying ‘V’ Metaphor
• Members care for and nurture one another
• Members cheer for and bolster the leader
• High level of trust among members
• When geese fly together, each goose provides additional lift and
reduces air resistance for the goose flying behind it. - 70%
farther
• When a goose drops out of the v-formation it quickly discovers
that it requires a great deal more effort and energy to fly.
• Geese rotate leadership. They honk at each other, and they help
each other.

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11Edinburgh Business School
Winning team – Medical Oxygen Plant project
Tata Advanced Systems Limited (TASL) MOP project ensured rapid and
cost-effective deployment of medical equipment for 300+ hospitals
across India during COVID-19 second wave.

2
P roje c t of the Year 202
nd Midsize
12 PMI Small a © Edinburgh Business School
 Team rules : Dignity and Respect
• Polite communication
• Fair workloads
• Communication, keeping people ‘in-the-loop’
• Respectful attitudes
• Understanding and positive outlook.
• Encouraging participation
• Attendance
• Delivering actions

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 Team roles : Working rules

• When/where will the team meet?

• Will the team have team/meeting roles?
• How will the team decide things?
• How will the team record decisions/actions?
• How will the team keep in touch between meetings?
• What happens if someone doesn’t turn up?
• What happens if someone doesn’t deliver?

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A group can be a team if…

Communication and
Roles and relationships Influence patterns
coordination

Team Dynamics

Conflict resolution Balance between task Dominance patterns

methods And social goals (who leads, who follows)

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Belbin Team Roles
• “A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others
in a particular way.“
• “Provides another perspective in which the participants could
view and gain feedback on their contribution in life
• Everyone is different ….

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16Edinburgh Business School
Belbin: Self Test

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Belbin: Grouping the roles

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Tuckman’s stages of Team Development

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Examples: Building Power Skills in Project
Teams
At Safaricom, PLC, a telecommunications
company in Nairobi, Kenya, employees are
required to pursue professional development
goals, and are given the time and resources to
do so. Meetings are discouraged on Fridays to
focus on learning activities, and staff have access
to a wide range of online training resources,
including LinkedIn Learning. A dedicated
coaching program offers professionally trained
coaches to anyone in the organization. When it
comes to assessing power skills, managers
regularly review teams’ power skills during
performance appraisals and offer coaching and
feedback. “We talk about things like clear
communication, project objectives, stakeholder
engagement and making sure that the users you
are delivering for are satisfied with your
engagement with them,” shares Mary Murekio,
Senior Program Manager - Digital IT. “We talk
about leading your project team members
toward achieving the goal.” Mentoring, whether
from formal coaches or managers, can help
employees connect what they learn to their
work, Murekio believes. “When I first did the
emotional intelligence training, I was a fairly
new manager in the organization. However, I did
not really connect with it on a personal level
until I got a coach. That is when I realized I need
to implement everything I learned in my
emotional intelligence training.”
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Project professionals at Kalyani Steels, Pune,
India, have access to a variety of learning and
development opportunities over the course of
their careers. “Soft skills are more important in
driving through or negotiating through the project
more smoothly,” says Partha S. Ghose, PMP,
Director - projects. However, not all employees
come in with the power skills they need to
succeed. “We try to train them, and we keep
training them continuously. Sometimes it is
informal through one-to-one interactions, and
sometimes through formal meetings and
organized classroom training.” Junior and mid-
level project team members are assigned an
experienced mentor when they are assigned to a
new project team. Mentors coach them on a
range of skills, from technical skills to power skills
like communication, people skills and instilling in
them cultural and environmental awareness. Soft
and behavioral skills are also incorporated into
both individual and team assessments. On the
individual level, annual reviews include
quantitative criteria for power skills. Team
evaluations are less structured but more
frequent. During weekly or monthly team
meetings, project leaders review the team’s
performance and identify difficulties — including
those related to power skills — where the team
needs support.
At IBM Australia, a regional program called
Source: PMI Pulse of The Profession 2023: Power Skills, Redefining Project Success (14ed).
“Lead to Influence” helps project managers
in the organization’s Asia Pacific region
(including Australia, India, China, Japan,
Korea and Singapore) learn the power skills
to become true leaders. Six 3-hour
modules, built in collaboration with
experienced program managers, focus on
skills like stakeholder management,
negotiation, problem solving and
storytelling. “We have so many courses on
how to manage a risk log or things like that,
but this one is actually helping you work
with your stakeholders and your teams,”
says Janelle Delaney, a delivery excellence
executive based in Sydney, Australia. “It is
about ‘How do I, as a project manager, lead
my team, work with my team and influence
my client to be where we want them to
be?’” While the program was created for
the Asia Pacific region — and offers courses
in local languages for staff in different
countries — Delaney is now working to take
it global through IBM’s Project
Management Center of Excellence. She is
also working to integrate it with IBM’s
internal certification system, which offers
badges to indicate skills and abilities.
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 Process /
Reasons why teams fail people
related

• Poorly developed or unclear goals

• Poorly defined project team roles
& interdependencies
• Lack of project team motivation
• Poor communication
• Poor leadership
• Turnover among project team
members
• Dysfunctional behavior

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Conflict Management
• Conflict is a process that begins when you
perceive that someone has frustrated or is
about to frustrate a major concern of yours

• Types of conflict:

• Goal-orientated conflict
• Administrative conflict
• Interpersonal conflict

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 Sources of conflict
• Organisational causes of conflict
• Reward systems
• Scarce resources
• Uncertainty
• Differentiation *
• Interpersonal causes of conflict
• Faulty attributions**
• Faulty communication
• Personal grudges and prejudices
** judge other people's actions as a result of some faulty personal characteristic they possess, while failing to recognize the variety of situational factors that could be
causing their behavior (Schneider, et al, 2012).
* people and tasks are grouped or split up into functions and divisions
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Ways of resolving conflict

• Mediate the conflict

a non-binding process in which a third party person works
with other parties to reach an agreement .

• Arbitrate the conflict

When a third-party hears evidence from other parties and
makes a judgment or decision which is binding by all parties.

• Control the conflict

• Accept the conflict
• Eliminate the conflict
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 Barriers to team development
• Mistake 1: Using a team for work that is better done by individuals

• Mistake 2: Calling the performing unit a team but really manage

members as individuals

• Mistake 3: Fall off the authority balance beam - giving away too much or
hoarding it

• Mistake 4: Dismantle existing organisational structures so that teams will

be fully ‘empowered’ to accomplish the work

• Mistake 5: Specify challenging team objectives but skimp on

organizational supports

• Mistake 6: Assume that members already have all the skills they need to
work26well as a team © Edinburgh Business School
Typical team problem
There were 4 team members named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, Nobody There was an
important job to do and everybody was asked to do it

Everybody was sure somebody would do it

Anybody could have done it but nobody did

Everybody was angry about that, because it was somebody’s job

Everybody thought anybody could do it, but nobody realised the everybody wouldn’t
In the end, everybody blamed somebody when nobody did what anybody could have done

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Virtual project teams
• Use electronic media to link members of a
geographically dispersed project team
• Skype
• Teleconferencing

• Technology

• How Can Virtual Teams Be Improved?

• Use face-to-face communication when possible

• Don’t let team members disappear
• Establish a code of conduct
• Keep everyone in the communication loop
• Create a process for addressing conflict

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Managing virtual project teams
• Challenges:
• Developing trust
• Exchange of social information.
• Set clear roles for each team member.

• Developing effective patterns of communication.

• Keep team members informed on
how the overall project is going.
• Don’t let team members vanish.
• Establish a code of conduct to avoid delays.
• Establish clear norms and protocols for surfacing
assumptions and conflicts.
• Share the pain.

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Project leadership

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Leadership
WHEN I TALK TO
MANAGERS
I GET THE FEELING THAT
THEY ARE IMPORTANT.

WHEN I TALK TO
LEADERS
I GET THE FEELING THAT
I AM IMPORTANT.

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Project Leadership
• Emotional intelligence:
• is the capability of individuals to
recognize their own emotions
and those of others, distinguish
between different feelings and
label them appropriately, use
emotional information to guide
thinking and behavior, and
manage and/or adjust emotions
to adapt to environments or
achieve one's goal(s)
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• The Project Management Practitioner
as Psychologist:
• The project manager needs as
much experience and as many
techniques as possible in order to
successfully manage project teams.
This is due largely to the fact that
people management is not an exact
science - hence the project
manager will benefit from gaining
an understanding of human
psychology and behaviour
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Leadership styles…

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Class Discussion

What is the difference

between
leading and managing a
project?

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Qualities of an effective project manager
• Systems thinker
• Personal integrity
• Proactive
• High emotional intelligence (EQ).
• General business perspective
• Effective time management
• Skillful politician
• Optimist

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 Project Leadership
• Keep everyone informed
• Client, project team, users

• Show progress
• Project documentation

• Take ownership of the project

• The project is your baby

• Look after your team

• You need them to succeed
• Give credit

• Communicate on different levels

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• Different hats for different occasions
PM Overall responsibility
• To achieve the project's objectives within
the time, cost and quality, performance
and any other constraints imposed by the
sponsor.

• Remember – You do not need to know

everything……..but you must have
enough information to be able to answer
all the questions

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Learning Outcomes

1 2 3 4 5 6
Understand the Recognize and Understand the Understand the Gain an awareness of Consider some of the
difference between understand the process of creating importance of virtual the stages of team dysfunctional aspects
groups and a team significance of teams the project team teams in development and of teams and barriers
in temporary contemporary group dynamics to their development
organizations . organisations

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Next week – Risk Management

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Thank You.

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