The last three months the project team I have been working with has been focused on helping an operations team satisfy audit requirements, streamline capturing of site work and making life a little bit easier for all involved. My role was process and change management, I worked with the team on the ground, learning how they "do stuff", feeding that back to the project team, making suggestions on process changes and then going back out to implement any changes as required.
It was a humbling experience on Friday when the project team was complying a report detailing the issues originally identified, how those issues have been addressed, the results of any changes and what is left to achieve. This opportunity to reflect became a bit of a "wow" moment, to see the results of the collective work, to look back at the starting point and understand how far the operations team had come and to realise that if the project hadn't been undertaken the operations team involved, now an essential service in the pandemic, would not have been in such a strong position to manage the current situation.
Working in project teams is fascinating and I learn something new every time. There are so many different styles and in my personal opinion it doesn't really matter which qualification is held, there are set project management criteria that is followed eg project team work ethics, core principles, charters, plans, issue registers etc - it is the individual project manager that brings their way of doing things. This has been one of the best project teams I have worked with, what made it different from all the rest?
Overview vs Detail
It is important for the project manager to maintain the overview of the project and not get too bogged down in the detail, let the project members manage the detail.
Not the easiest thing to achieve and takes a fair amount of control by the project manager to keep themselves out but it enables them to bring the team back on track as the detail starts to absorb the project members and take them on tangents.
Respect
The project team was made up of a variety of skills - project management, data analyst, IT, process and change management, technical and operations.
The project manager and team members respected each others skills and their ability to deliver based on those skills. I'm not saying there wasn't robust discussion, there definitely was, but it was always focused on the work at hand and each person's opinion was respected. This meant that before a change was implemented it was well thought through, more robust.
Project Team Core Values
When working on a project at fast pace with a sense of urgency and your executive team is relying on you to get it right, it can be difficult to keep in touch with the bigger picture. This is where the core values of the project team is so important, they become the guiding light.
One of the core values of this team was to think about the people that were to use the system, ensure that their needs were taken into account and remove barriers whilst obtaining the information required. It was not enough to just tell the staff to "do as they were told", there was limited time therefore they had to be convinced of the benefits to ensure that the uptake was quick and robust. This meant that project team IT had to build some of the benefits - and quickly - to keep the fragile "trust relationship" developing.
Staying out of the Politics
There have been many project teams that lose their full effectiveness because politics start to trickle in and the longer the project, the harder it is to remain objective.
This project has been fairly short and busy with little opportunity to get involved in the politics and because the project team came from different parts of the business, there was no history of how things "should / are meant to work". It will be interesting to see what happens when it gets passed back to BAU.