Teams - Creation and optimisation
Contents |
Understanding teams Introduction
What is a team? A good team compliments one and others competence and skills, and they have a positive environment, they are individuals working towards a common goal. How does a team differ from a group and why is a team better? A group consist of independent individuals, and they are driven by their own goals. Whereas in a team the individuals that can work independently. They work together towards a common goal, and they care about the results as a unit and not as individuals. How do we create successful teams? A team concerts of individuals who can work together and takes on different roles within the team. It's important that the team notes each other’s personality traits and work habits and they have a clear distinction between their roles in the team. Communication between members is essential as well as discussions within the team. When designing a team, it's important to have in mind what skills and competence are needed, as well as how the personalities and the individuals work habits will mesh within the team. Once a team has been created you can work towards a high performing team this is done within the team wants they had a clear vision of the goal and how to work towards the common goal.
Group vs teams
What is the difference between a group and a team? A group is composed of independent individuals who coordinate their individual efforts. Whereas a team is composed of individuals who work together toward a shared goal/purpose. The individuals in the group have their own personal priorities and goals for a project, whereas a team have common priorities and goal.
Creating the team
When creating a team it is essential to consider the team members personalities, roles, work rhythm and introduce and clarify the goal. For the team to be effective, they must trust each other, be committed to and take accountability for the project. It is further vital for the team's effectiveness that the project manager and team take into account:
- Composition: Team competencies, personalities, roles, diversity etc.
- Work design: Skill variety, task identity and task significance.
- Context: Adequate resources, Leadership.
- Process: development process, common purpose, specific goals, conflict.
The composition of the team is vital to the team's success. In order to address this, the project manager must have an insight and understanding of the team's different personalities. Some of the tools used for identifying personalities can be The big five (OCEAN)link title, The Myers-Briggs Type Indicatorlink title or Belbin's Team Roles[1][2]. Knowing the personality types and preference for the different members preference for workflow can optimise team communicate, tasks completion and role assignments.
Ex. David and Elsa are part of a team and are assigned a task together and need to divide the work. David wakes up at 5 am every morning and starts working at 6 am and go home at 2 pm. He prefers face to face communication and phone calls when communicating with others. David prefers to get an overview of the project before going into details. Elsa wakes up at 9 am and start working at 10 am and goes home at 6 pm. She prefers written down task/reports and emails when communicating with others. Elsa prefers to get all details immediately for each section of the project. David and Elsa know how one another prefers to work and figure how best to schedule and divide task so they are both happy. They schedule all meetings between 11 am and 1 pm. The meetings are face to face and they write a summary for meetings. they mainly use email as communication but they can call each other to confirm things. David takes care of the morning tasks and Elsa takes care of the afternoon tasks.
The work design
Context
The process needs to be clear for the team, to ensure the project is being done on time. The project manager have different tool/methodologies they can implement for the team to use for the project. Some of the most commonly used are:
- Agile
- Scrum
- Kanban
- Lean
- eXtreme Programming methodology (XP)
- Waterfall
- V-model
High performing teams
A high performing team is defined by: A high-performance team can be defined as: a group of people with specific roles and complementary talents and skills, aligned with and committed to a common purpose, who consistently show high levels of collaboration and innovation, produce superior results, and extinguish radical or extreme opinions that could be damaging. The high-performance team is regarded as tight-knit, focused on their goal and have supportive processes that will enable any team member to surmount any barriers in achieving the team's goals[4]
