Project Team Management: What Managers Should Know

A project team is a well-coordinated group of specialists working to achieve a common goal, but to what extent should this group be coordinated per se? And do team members really need to think about their interaction with each other? Here’s how to best organize processes.

What Is a Project Team?

Let's start with the definition: a project team is a group of specialists who have combined their efforts to achieve a certain goal within the framework of a specific project. The key difference from a specific task force or company unit is that such teams are most often formed on a temporary basis and are dissolved after the project is completed.

Hence, there are a couple of things that project managers need to keep in mind at all times:

1. Place emphasis on forming the project team. You need to have a clear understanding of what specialists you need, for what tasks, and for what period of time, even at the preliminary planning stage of the project. If you make a miscalculation at this stage, the workflow will be a mess, there will be inevitable bottlenecks, missed deadlines, and other problems.
2. Formalize relationships between project team members. This is a pivotal point: your team will include people who have not previously worked with one another. You can’t rely on their personal characteristics and charming qualities, you need a well-defined methodology and monitoring tools.
3. Don't go overboard. Essentially, you need to achieve your project goals on time without going over budget. As a rule, you don’t need to create a full-on dream team for this, you simply need to achieve a certain level of coherence.

To put it another way, you need to choose the right people, create an environment for each of them to focus on their assigned tasks and not have to worry about intercommunication, and equip yourself with everything you will need to monitor and manage the entire process.

Forming a Project Team

The basic steps of project team formation include:

1. Analyze project needs. Determine what objectives will have to be achieved, what specialists you will need, and what number of them you will require.
2. Search and select candidates. Choose the most suitable employees, conduct interviews and test their performance.
3. Create a team. Clearly define the tasks and responsibilities of each recruited employee. We’ll cover the roles within the project team in more detail in our upcoming article.

What Project Team Management Entails

Okay, let's say you have recruited the right team members, now you need to organize their work. The less employees will have to think about any internal workflow processes or interactions with each other, the better; therefore, you’re aiming to achieve the following goals:

1. There is a detailed project plan prepared by the management team. Project goals, objectives, timelines, allocated resources, and responsible individuals are neatly defined.
2. There are clear roles within the team, all employees know what they are assigned to do and what they are responsible for.
3.  All project team members are fully aware of the status of the project and the activities of other team members to the extent they need to perform their roles.
4. You monitor task performance in real time, easily assess progress at each stage, and can quickly intervene and make adjustments to the project plan.

All of these aspects require a thorough systematic approach to project team organization and, preferably, full automation (otherwise you will simply be swamped with meetings, check-ins, revisions, and reports).

Project Team Management Tools

You are going to need to distribute tasks, monitor their execution, and ensure that employees communicate with each other in a transparent manner. All of this can be accomplished by choosing the right project management software.

Take, for example, our Kickidler Project Tracking solution. Here are its features that can come incredibly in hand when managing project teams:

• kanban board;
• Gantt chart by projects and epics;
• analytical financial report;
• reports on productivity, workload and employee working hours (you will be able to see at a glance where the bottlenecks are, who is slacking off, and so on);
•  reports on websites and applications (with its help, you will be able to optimize processes and identify procrastinators);
• Attention Focus – a special module that highlights how the efforts are distributed within the project team members.

Usually, in order to get all these tools at your disposal, you would need a combination of project management and time tracking tools. But we have brought them together in a single solution: you will be able to organize all the processes within a single data network, saving both time and resources!

The main thing for you is to remember to utilize all the features of our software we’ve listed and stay on top of everything. Remember that you, as a manager, should be fully engaged in project management: after all, you’re the only one who has a complete picture provided by Kickidler.