1 Executive Summary
Refer to Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK 5th Edition) project is temporary activities where the success is measured in terms of Iron Triangle (Scope, Time and Cost), Stakeholders expectation and project objectives.
This report discusses the definition of project success, success measurement, leadership and enabling project success.
Furthermore, will discuss the project team and the 5 Tuckman’s team stages, namely forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. Among this report discuss the project communication and empathy play a crucial part in all conflicts and all the conflicts are required to resolved immediately without any emotions attached.
Motivation is another technique to assist the project managers in the project achievement that discuss in this report.
2 Introduction
This report has been prepared to explain the meaning of project success and the critical factors that drive to acquire project success. It will also discuss how to measure success and its frameworks.
This report gathers the information, theories, techniques, from PMI Project Management Institute’s articles, PMBOK guideline and several project management websites.
The author tried to use the updated from last ten years published articles to write this report.
This report discusses the project success and its measurement in terms of Iron Triangle (Scope, Time and Cost), Stakeholders expectation and project objectives.
This report discusses the definition of project success, success measurement, leadership and enabling project success.
Furthermore, will discuss the project team and the 5 Tuckman’s team stages, namely forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. Among this report discuss the project communication and empathy play a crucial part in all conflicts and all the conflicts are required to resolved immediately without any emotions attached.
Motivation is another technique to assist the project managers in the project achievement that discuss in this report.
3.1 Definition
Refer to PMBOK 5thEdition the project success is “Since projects are temporary in nature, the success of the project should be measured in terms of completing the project within the constraints of scope, time, cost, quality, resources, and risk as approved between the project managers and senior management. To ensure realization of benefits for the undertaken project, a test period (such as soft launch in services) can be part of the total project time before handing it over to the permanent operations. Project success should be referred to the last baselines approved by the authorized stakeholders.” although success and failure is basically a matter of stakeholder appreciation. (Cavarec, Y-2012).
3.2 Project Success Measures
Figure 1Iron Triangle
Stakeholders expectation and project objectives are other two major key measurement in the project success.
Individual project success also links to product success, business success and also a strategic (organisational) success (Paul Bannerman, 2008).
3.3 Leadership
Queen Elizabeth II quotes “I know of no single formula for success. But over the years I have observed that some attributes of leadership are universal and are often about finding ways of encouraging people to combine their efforts, their talents, their insights, their enthusiasm and their inspiration to work together.”
Many personas make a good leader which are
· Honesty & Integrity
· Vision
· Inspiration
· Ability to Challenge
· Able to Execute a Vision
· Ability to Direct
· Process Management
· People Focused
3.4 Enabling Project Success
Various critical elements enable the project’s success and following five factors are the most common critical ones.
1. Managing Project Teams
2. Leadership
3. Communication
4. Project Scope Management
5. Project Planning and Control
4 Managing Project Team
Teamwork is not a new idea. The basic concepts of organising and managing teams go back in history to biblical times. However, it was not before the beginning of the Twentieth Century that work teams were formally recognized as an effective device for enhancing organisational performance (Thamhain,2007).
4.1 Project Team
Project Management Institute (PMI) defines project as “A project is unique in that it is not a routine operation, but a specific set of operations designed to accomplish a singular goal. So a project team often includes people who don’t usually work together sometimes from different organizations and across multiple geographies.”
As mentioned above, every project starts, executes and finish by a team. And it is project leader/manager duties to guide the project team to deliver the project with its achievement.
It is understood that no project can be achieved by a single individual person. It has to be achieved by a team. Team is a type of group (a set of individuals) which has additional characteristics such as interdependent, interacting co-ordinately, taking personal and responsibility for group mutual outcome.
4.2 Project Team Development
Tuckman’s stages of Team development define of five stage in Team Development which are:
1. Forming:When the team first meets each other.
2. Storming:As the team begins to work together, they move into the “storming” stage
3. Norming:When they are beginning to work more effectively as a team.
4. Performing:When teams are functioning at a very high level.
5. Adjourning:When the project is coming to an end and the team members are moving off into different directions.
Figure 2Five Stage of Team Development
There is requirement for leadership required during the first two stages as the team requires to understand each other, project’s goals and objectives, start to think about what role they will play on the project team. Coaching from the leader is still required at the norming stage. Monitoring of project manager/leader is indeed required at the performing stage, in this stage, the team leader is not involved in decision making, problem solving or other such activities involving the day-to-day work of the team. The team members work effectively as a group and do not need the oversight that is required at the other stages.
The team at adjourning stage will also be looking back to the beginning, noticing how far they have come and measuring what their contribution has been to the whole.
Figure 3 & 4 shows each Tuckman’s Staging and requirement of leadership.
4.3 Project Communication
Refer to Rajkumar “Communication is an essential process in our day-to-day life, and the entire world revolves around it. Lasswell's Maxim defines communication as “who says what to whom in what channel with what effect”. Communication is exchanging of information from one point of the project to the other point in an efficient manner.” (Rajkumar, S. (2010))
In project the main effective way to lead team to reach the goals and project target is the communication. In author’s opinion the optimal collaborative number of the team group to lead effectively should be between five to nine persons. As major of projects requires more than nine people, it is recommended to breakdown the organization chart to the optimal collaborative group.
In Table 4.1 "Possible Interaction in Groups", the number of possible interactions grows according to how many people are in the group. At some point, we all find the possible and actual interactions overwhelming and subdivide into smaller groups. For example, you may have hundreds of friends on Myspace or Facebook, but how many of them do you regularly communicate with? You may be tempted to provide a number greater than eight, but if you exclude the “all to one” messages, such as a general tweet to everyone (but no one person in particular), you’ll find the group norms will appear. (McLean. S 2012)
Number of Group Members
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
6
|
7
|
8
|
Number of Possible Interactions
|
2
|
9
|
28
|
75
|
186
|
441
|
1,056
|
Following organisation chart is suggested to breakdown the team for project communication achievement.
4.4 Managing Project Conflicts
Refer to the Association for Project Management “Conflict can be defined as different objectives and attitudes between two or more parties. Conflict management is the process of identifying and addressing differences that, if left unresolved, could affect objectives.
Not all conflict is negative. Facilitating healthy conflict without suppression can support group development and learning experiences. Conflict is a necessary component of some team development models but, even there, it must be carefully managed to prevent it becoming counterproductive.” (APM)
The following are common sources of conflicts, especially in the project environment.
· Schedules
· Project priorities
· Resource competition
· Cultural differences
· Technical issues
· Team or clique
· Personality conflicts
· Organization structure
· Communication barriers
· Poor planning
As soon as the conflicts rise during the project, the project manager should arrange a team meeting to minimise the conflicts for example daily tool box meeting is one of the essential ways to discuss with the team member about the conflicts the project managers should constantly motivate and develop the project team to lead them into accomplishing the objectives of the project.
Refer to Guan, THE RATE OF PROJECT SUCCESS IS VERY MUCH DEPENDENT ON THE BEHAVIOR OF THE PROJECT TEAM” (Guan.D, 2007)
conflicts may rise due to interest and judgement of team members, lack of communication, roles and responsibility or due to location of the team member.
Conflict resolution can be achieved by the following table 4.3.
Resolution Type
|
Common result
|
• Forcing
|
win-lose
|
• Smoothing
|
yield-lose
|
• Withdrawing
|
lose-leave
|
• Compromising
|
moderate lose-moderate lose
|
• Problem solving or confrontation
|
integrative
|
4.5 Motivating Team
Refer to the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK) concluded that the skill in motivating team is project manager’s important assets. The motivation of the team is important for the project’s success because motivation is directly proportional to the team’s performance.
There are several ways to motivate the team during the project which are as below:
· Face to face meeting and collaboration with the team
· Provide safe work place
· Offer for opportunities and knowledge development
· Encourage their task and duties
· Minimize Micromanagement
· Set Clear Goals
· Minimize meeting
In author’s experience in several construction projects, practicing above items assists the project to reach its goals smoothly.
5 Conclusion
In the projects, the main factor to success the project is the team and it is project manager responsibilities to deliver the project within the scope, budget, quality and time. All the three factors in Iron Triangle (Quality, Cost, Time) is not achievable without the team to deliver.
From forming of the team to performing stage, Project Manager should always consider evaluate, support its team as it is the team who is delivering the project and meets its goals.
6 Reference
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Wilson, C. (2010). BRUCE TUCKMAN’S FORMING, STORMING, NORMING & PERFORMING TEAM DEVELOPMENT MODEL. [online] Sst7.org. Available at: http://sst7.org/media/BruceTuckman_Team_Development_Model.pdf [Accessed 10 Aug. 2019].
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