Project Management ToolBox: Tools and Techniques for the Practicing Project Manager

10

Team Building

This chapter is contributed by Hans J. Thamhain, Bentley College.

A castle is only as strong as the people who defend it.

Sun Tzu—The Art of War

This chapter focuses on the tools for identifying, organizing, and developing the project team:

• Four-Stage Model of Project Team Building
• Stakeholder Matrix
• Skill Inventory
• Commitment Scorecard

Figure 10.1 The role of team-planning tools in the standardized project management process.

These tools focus specifically on the human side of project planning, helping to analyze the resource requirements, and to identify, recruit, and build the people needed into a unified, high-performing project team. In addition, many of today's projects require team building as a continuing process throughout their life cycles. Therefore, consistent with the broad concept of stakeholder management and the need for developing learning organizations, these tools overlap other phases of the standardized PM process shown in Figure 10.1. The purpose of this chapter is to help practicing and prospective PM professionals to

• Understand and build the skills needed to function effectively on their project teams.
• Select project leaders and team members.
• Build cross-functional communication networks and alliances.
• Deal with conflict and power sharing.
• Build project ownership and commitment.
• Develop a learning organization.

Mastering these tools ...