CHAPTER 3

Project Team Processes

Objectives:

• Understand the team-development processes.

• Recognize processes to improve project team performance.

• Learn the characteristics required of successful leaders.

• Apply different team-development processes to various business situations and projects.

• Explore the value of lessons learned and develop appropriate strategies for capturing lessons learned.

Preview

This chapter focuses on the next aspect of teamwork: the actual processes that teams undergo for their effective performance. The discussion clearly differentiates processes and projects, noting the necessity of both. Various team development processes are explained with discussions and using the process models. The focus is on what is required by capable project leaders, and what different factors will impact their leadership ability. Communication and similar interpersonal skills are extensively discussed to underscore the possible cause–effect relationships that can stem from interpersonal situations. The chapter also underscores the importance of technology tools in managing projects. Many theoretical aspects of leadership and performance management are explained using examples, and their close relationship with knowledge management (KM) and learning are discussed in detail.

A team can perform effectively and efficiently when proven and established processes are in place. This is particularly important for project teams so that they can focus primarily on the uncertainties and unknowns of the project and not on redefining processes associated with team development and performance.

A process is defined as a group of repetitive and related actions that are systematic to achieve a specific result or service or end. A process is usually designed to improve productivity. Therefore, processes can be changed and revised when there is a need to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Processes are ongoing, repetitive, and produce the same result, whereas projects are temporary and unique, and project outcomes are essentially new. However, processes are integral to projects, project teams, and project management (PM). Just like projects go through various task-related project management processes such as planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing processes, the project team goes through similar processes such as team selection, team develop ment, team performance, and termination. Furthermore, individual phases of team processes like team development and team performance can have multiple subprocesses. Some of these processes are standard and explicitly defined; a few others may have to be adapted to specific project situations.

Team Process and Taskwork

A team process is characterized by members interacting with other members and with their task environment. It is a mediating mechanism linking variables such as team members and organizational characteristics including structure, culture, supporting systems, performance and incentive systems, employee morality, and top management support.

Team processes are used to direct, align, and monitor taskwork, which are mostly people-related activities of coordination, communication, collaboration, decision making, and conflict management.

Taskwork, in the context of projects, is comprised of task-related activities such as project plan, requirement analysis, scope definition and development, project schedule, project budget, project execution, quality management, and monitoring and control.

A distinction between team processes and taskwork is that the latter is defined as a team’s interactions with tasks, tools, machines, and systems.¹

Taskwork represents what it is that teams are doing, whereas team process describes how work is being accomplished.

Taskwork is critical to team effectiveness and depends heavily on member competence and team processes. Together, taskwork and team processes would determine a team’s effectiveness and efficiency.

Team-Development Process

Classic theories suggest that teams develop through a series of four stages: forming, norming, storming, and performing.² These four stages of team development are seen as a linear progression. This may not always be true and new theories are emerging. However, it is helpful to present this classic team-development process to provide a basis for discussion on team development.

As one moves from the forming stage toward the performing stage, team performance and productivity are likely to improve. The four-stage team development model combines both task-related and people-related activities (Figure 3.1).

Forming stage: When team members first come together, as a first step toward becoming an integrated and cohesive unit, the project manager must help them become acquainted with one another. Team members will have many questions such as who are the other members, what is expected of them, and who is leading. The project manager needs to provide direction during this stage and curb negative emotions.

Figure 3.1 Team-development process

Storming stage: At this stage, team members are likely to explore different roles, understand dependencies, and express their differences. These behaviors often lead to conflict and counterdependence. The long-term success of the team depends on its ability to successfully overcome these problems. The typical interpersonal behaviors that signal this stage are the formation of coalitions, competition among members, disagreement with the leader, and challenges to one another’s points of view. Fostering win–win relationships is critical.

Norming stage: After team members become acquainted with one another, the next stage of team development involves creating a sense of team identity and unity, which can be accelerated by additional means such as informal social gatherings. During this stage, the primary focus is on defining processes for a coordinated effort to execute project work, defining roles and responsibilities of the team, communicating expectations, and developing a work culture of working together.

Performing stage: Teams realize the need for collaboration, continuous improvement, and productivity. The team tends to become more effective and efficient, with an emphasis on quality. Strengthening relationships, commitment, support, and learning are emphasized as teams share vision and develop trust. The project manager needs to provide a supportive leadership role.

It is not necessary that every project team go through these four stages sequentially. Factors such as the project size, project team size, urgency, and complexity would influence the duration and sequence of these stages, which may overlap. Furthermore, the nature of the project team (traditional or virtual) would also influence these four stages.

Project Team Process

The team-development process can also be viewed as three action phases.³ (Figure 3.2).

Project teams start with the transition processes, in which team members set goals and develop plans to meet these goals through analysis by obtaining requirements, developing specifications, defining scope, and developing comprehensive project plan, in that order.

As transition processes are evolving, action processes such as project execution, monitoring, and controlling will overlap with the final stages of the transition processes. During the action processes, team members coordinate, monitor progress, and develop change plans if necessary.

Interpersonal processes take place throughout the transition and action processes and people-related activities such as team selection and development, definition of roles and responsibilities, communication, collaboration, conflict management, and motivation are addressed.

Figure 3.2 Team process

In other words, transition processes and action processes are task-related processes and interpersonal processes are people-related processes.

Emergent states describe the cognitive, motivational, and affective states of teams, as opposed to the nature of their member interactions.⁴ Teams with low cohesion (an emergent state) may be less willing to manage existing conflict (the process), which, in turn, may create an additional conflict that lowers cohesion levels even further. Emergent states do not represent team interaction or team actions that lead toward outcomes. Rather, they are products of team experiences (including team processes) and become new inputs to subsequent processes and outcomes.

Team Management and Leadership Process

Of all the resources, managing human resources presents more challenges. Managing and leading people are the most challenging aspects of managing a team and deserve special attention and a clearly defined process is justified, specifically in projects.

It is important to understand the distinction between management and leadership, which is not always obvious. Management is usually focused on classical functions such as planning, organizing, and controlling. In general, management is concerned with making decisions about processes and functions in order to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness. Leadership, on the other hand, is about motivating and guiding people to realize their potential and achieve tougher and challenging organizational goals.

Projects, by definition, are new and unique. Consequently, they have little precedence and are often associated with uncertainties and unknowns. It is reasonable to assume that it is not if the project plan will change, but when the change occurs, what the change will be, and by how much. Furthermore, the absence of control over project team selection and lack of formal authority over project team members contribute to the challenges associated with managing and leading a project.

Project teams are comprised of people from multiple disciplines, as project tasks require expertise and skills in several disciplines. Furthermore, project tasks are characterized by risks, unknowns, and uncertainties. Consequently, projects often have to deal with changes. In general, projects also have to deal with complexity. Furthermore, time and budget constraints, uncertainties, and unknowns contribute to project complexity. The complexity demands that project managers plan and manage projects within the competing constraints of scope (project outcomes), cost, and duration. It is not always possible to meet the goals of one of them without compromising other two constraints. Priority would be given to the one that is more important for the client.

Several project characteristics underscore the importance of management and leadership roles in project performance. When projects are complex, the project manager’s emphasis will be on the management role of planning and controlling. When changes are significant, the leadership role assumes greater importance. Leadership then is directed toward convincing people about the need to change, aligning them to a new direction, and motivating people to work together to achieve project objectives under difficult and demanding work environments.

While project-related factors such as complexity, uncertainty, unknowns, and risk may vary for each project, people- and team-related management and leadership roles and the responsibilities of the project manager, to a great extent, are common and similar in all the projects. After a comprehensive study of past research and a survey of several project management professionals, people-related project performance factors are identified (Table 3.1) and their interdependencies (arrow means “leads to”) are shown as the team leadership process (Figure 3.3).

Defining processes and roles: Project planning, which includes identifying total work, estimating total effort and cost, and developing the schedule, is developed to make optimum use of all resources. Work packages and associated tasks require people from multiple disciplines to accomplish a task with a high degree of coordination. Under these circumstances, it is essential to define roles and responsibilities to bring stability and order.

Employing these formal and consistent project management processes: The nature of project tasks demands a multidisciplinary approach and needs people from different functions. Each person, with specific expertise and experience to the project team, contributes to the complexity and the project team becomes a challenging entity to manage. Employing consistent processes helps bring order to managing the project team’s diverse skills representing the different disciplines. Technology plays a crucial support role in developing and deploying standard and consistent processes.

Table 3.1 People-related factors

Factor	Description
Define roles and responsibilities	At the outset, defining roles and responsibilities of project team members without ambiguity is imperative for improving performance and managing conflicts.
Create clarity in communication	Defining project goals and likely project outcomes early in the project and communicating clearly to all the team members without ambiguity.
Communicate expectations	Defining outcomes and establishing what is expected from all the team members will eventually eliminate perceived and actual incidences of not delivering expected results.
Employ consistent processes	Developing and deploying consistent and formal project management processes assist in improving operational efficiency, managing risk, and reducing ambiguity.
Build competencies	Individuals aspire to join a project team when they realize that there is an opportunity for personal and professional growth.
Establish trust	Organizational culture that promotes transparency and openness in communications would promote trust and would lead to knowledge sharing and collaboration.
Facilitate support	The project manager must have top-management support that translates into organization-wide support for the project tasks.
Manage outcomes	A clearly defined project mission statement and clear objectives help in developing a formal evaluation of project outcomes to determine project success. It promotes motivation, recognition, and team synergy.

Communicating expectations and providing clarity in communication: Project managers can establish an environment of openness and transparency with effective communication of expectations, project goals, and likely project outcomes.

Facilitating support: Project managers must identify organizational support needs for the project and acquire them to effectively accomplish the expected project outcomes.

Figure 3.3 Team management and leadership process

Figure 3.3 depicts these roles by identifying the underlying relations among critical attributes of the project manager. Defining processes and roles is the foundation for planning and managing a project. Without such formal definition and approval of roles, projects would lack organizational and functional support. Defining the roles and processes would logically lead to developing formal processes. Several tools and techniques are available for developing these formal processes. Additionally, defining the roles of project team members and all the stakeholders would help both the project team members and project stakeholders understand what is expected of them. These factors help project managers define and manage project goals and outcomes. Technology’s role also is important in developing, communicating, and monitoring project outcomes.

Predictability and openness are important factors in establishing trust. Furthermore, trust and communication are essential to nurture human relationships. By defining processes and roles, the project manager can establish expectations from the stakeholders and also ensure predictability and openness in communication. Together, these factors instill trust among the team members and the project manager. Establishing trust usually takes time and projects are time bound; this only adds a greater challenge. By establishing trust, the project manager can also mitigate conflicts, a deterrent to project performance.

Building competencies: Individuals aspire to join a project team when they realize that the project presents an opportunity for personal and professional growth. With challenging project work comes an opportunity to learn something new. As such, individuals should be presented with an opportunity to build competencies through mentoring, learning, and training wherever necessary. Such actions would help project managers earn the trust of team members.

Figure 3.3 shows that there is no direct relationship between establishing trust and managing outcomes. Past research studies confirm this and show that a relationship between trust and performance remains somewhat elusive in collaborative relationships. Trust has a positive, though limited, and indirect impact on performance.

People are motivated by challenges and opportunities to further their career goals. Those who are assigned to project teams are almost always interested in accomplishing personal and professional goals in addition to completing the assigned project tasks. With this in mind, project managers should inquire into the personal aspirations of the project team members and support them by defining their project roles and responsibilities. The project manager plays the role of motivating and guiding project team members for their professional growth, while completing their project-related tasks and responsibilities.

The project manager’s leadership responsibility is to clearly define the project mission and to translate it into measurable project outcomes. However, many organizations do not define a formal process of evaluating project performance. Furthermore, the perception of failure and success is often based on unspoken and personal indices. The project manager must develop a set of performance indices that formalize the process and make explicitly clear what is implicit in these seemingly subjective evaluations. Without defining these measures, managing outcomes would be difficult.

Team-Performance Process

The people-related factors shown in Figure 3.3 can work both as enablers and barriers. Therefore, developing a process that represents these factors as causals, means, and effects would allow us to understand how each of these factors can act either as an enabler or a barrier to project performance (Figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4 Team performance process

Establishing trust and managing outcomes are the end results or effects. As shown in Figure 3.4, the means can be controlled, manipulated, or developed to form the link between the causals and the effects. Communicating expectations, employing consistent processes, and facilitating support within the organization are the factors that can be moderated or enhanced in order to accomplish the effects.

The performance process shown in Figure 3.4 can be to understand the possibility of the people-related factors acting as enablers or barriers. For instance, one can argue that a robust practice of clarity in communications would help the project manager to communicate expectations at the outset of the project. On the contrary, if the project manager fails to communicate with clarity, it is unlikely that the expectations from the key stakeholders will be well conveyed. Thus, clarity in communication can act as an enabler or barrier. This argument demonstrates the dual role of all these factors either as enablers or barriers.

Project outcomes—derived from a clearly defined project mission and objectives—help to develop a formal evaluation to determine project success. Defining these outcomes and evaluating individual and team performance against them would motivate team members to perform better. Needless to say, managing these outcomes would not be possible without a clear definition of roles and processes, support from the organization, and effective communication.

Team Communication Process

Unique and new characteristics vary from project to project and are accompanied by uncertainties and unknowns, thereby influencing the difficulties associated with managing projects. Associated with uncertainty is stress that can lead to decreased motivation and participation.

One can manage uncertainty by developing a risk management plan. However, risk management alone is not sufficient to manage uncertainty. Communication plays an important role in reducing uncertainty. This is true for traditional colocated and virtual project teams. It is obvious that there are more communication challenges in virtual teams due to lack of opportunities for face-to-face and nonverbal communications.

Poor listening skills and assumptions that are made while receiving a message are the primary reasons for communication failure. Likewise, words mean different things to different people due to cultural differences. In the previous chapter, communication challenges associated with cultural differences were discussed. To circumvent the challenge associated with verbal communication, visual images are used in many public places like airports, metro transportation systems, malls, public buildings, and public places to minimize misunderstandings arising out of verbal communications and assumptions.

An array of traffic signals is the most commonly used visual communication. Imagine substituting written messages instead of red, yellow, and green light signals at road intersections and highways. It would be chaotic and a traffic nightmare!

Where verbal (oral and written) communication is used, you may encourage the receiver of the message to engage in a conversation to verify, reduce misunderstanding, and add clarity. As the receiver of the message one must consider asking questions for clarity and, as a sender, it is helpful to ask the recipient of the message to repeat how the message was understood, with specific focus on what needs to be done.

Supportive communication is critical to fostering a positive and productive interpersonal relationship. Supportive communication is the communication that seeks to preserve a positive relationship between the communicators while still addressing the problem at hand.⁵ Figure 3.5 shows eight attributes of supportive communication:

Figure 3.5 Communication process

As Figure 3.5 denotes, managers can either facilitate or constrain the free flow of information and ideas. Furthermore, open communication and tolerance for ambiguity on the part of project leadership also contribute positively to project success.

Communication with senior executives: Project-related issues with top management and senior executives tend to focus on highlighting issues, risks, and exceptions. Often the communication is formal in the form of reports. Tools used for this purpose are:

• Exception reports

• Periodic (weekly/monthly) reports

• Project charters

• E-mails

• Reviews (in person and through reports)

Communication with project team: The project manager uses status reports, and provides direction and support to the project team by means of reporting information about the project status, pending tasks, project plan updates, and progress reports. Direction and support are mostly informal and happen on a daily basis. Consequently, the communication is both formal and informal in the form of reports, routine meetings (daily/weekly), e-mail exchanges, and conversations (in person and through electronic media). The tools used for this purpose are:

• Status reports

• Meetings (daily/weekly)

• E-mails

• Reviews (in person and through reports)

Communication with external stakeholders: Periodically, the project manager and the team communicate with external stakeholders that include clients, contractors, vendors, regulatory agencies, and end users. Communication is mostly formal. Negotiation skills, emotional intelligence, conflict management, and tact are important. Tools used for this purpose are:

• Communication plan

• Contracts

• Statement of work

• Purchase orders

• Deliverable (product/service) prototypes

• Compliance reports

In a broader context, many organizations and institutions use acronyms. The use of acronyms and short-cut methods of communication is common and specific to every culture, region, country, and even the industry. Notable examples are evident in military, medical profession, air traffic control systems, and information technology (IT) software industries. This style of communication is facilitated by familiarity and results in speedy communication. Perhaps, familiarity is one of the reasons why research has shown that many organizations prefer to have contracts written in the native language.

Team Technology Process

Technology—one that facilitates knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer—plays a key role in promoting project management maturity and in improving project team performance. Historical data from the past project-planning documents, lessons learned from projects, how and why decisions are made, and communications are some of the sources of information that help to create new knowledge and to develop new systems and processes, thereby avoiding past mistakes.

In the context of managing the task-related issues of projects and project teams, technology is considered as a combination of IT and KM. IT is effective in converting data into information, but it is not a good choice for creating knowledge. The reason is simple: Knowledge creation requires human judgment. It is imperative to define these terms:

• Knowledge can be derived from thinking and it is a combination of information, experience, and insight. Deriving knowledge from information requires human judgment, and is based on context and experience.

• Knowledge management (KM) is defined as an important strategic initiative to utilize information technology and tools, business processes, best practices, and culture to develop and share knowledge within an organization by those who possess knowledge with those who do not.

However, uncertainty increases as data are used to derive information and information is used to generate knowledge. Data are unambiguous whereas information is subject to interpretation, and knowledge is personal but very important in making decisions. Managing knowledge effectively will have a direct impact on the ability of firms to bridge the gap between IT and end users, thereby impacting organizational performance. Therefore, IT in conjunction with KM is desirable for good results.

Technology is used to denote both the IT and KM for two reasons. First, KM is considered a bridge between IT and business, and second, combining both KM and IT will facilitate knowledge sharing and provide opportunities to enhance performance in a project environment. The role of technology (IT and KM) depends on how technology systems are designed in organizations and deployed for projects. It is important that organizations develop technology systems to meet specific business and project needs. They should not be designed in isolation with the assumption that people will use it for productive purposes.

Organizations should make use of technology to store and share information and capture knowledge of past and present projects. This would help in developing better and more accurate project plans, detailed specifications, and reduce the extent and impact of uncertainties. Additionally, technology can help simplify, streamline, and standardize project management processes. It facilitates integration of complex projects and, specifically, technology plays a crucial role in managing global projects.

Technology helps design project management tools for planning and web-based support systems, which are essential for managing soft issues such as communication, conflict resolution, and knowledge sharing. The use of sophisticated project management tools, driven by factors such as project complexities and diverse cultures requiring new management skills, is having a profound impact on project leadership. Furthermore, methods of communication, decision making, soliciting commitment, and risk sharing facilitate a shift of management style to a team-centered and self-directed form of project control. Technology is essential to support this shift to participative management and the leadership of projects. Integrating project management and technology tools at every phase of the project management life cycle is desirable for both traditional and virtual project teams (Figure 3.6).

Project managers can employ technology tools to capture data and information and facilitate knowledge development and transfer. Historical project performance data can feed back into data repositories and database systems, and the result is a fluid knowledge flow between project management processes and technology tools. Project managers can achieve a level of continuous improvement in project performance by applying technology tools throughout the project management life cycle:

Figure 3.6 Technology and project management tools

• Selection of projects using knowledge-based decision systems

• Development of resource breakdown structure (RBS) and keeping it current with resource cost information from recently concluded projects

• Development of project plans and scope with the help of repositories

• Estimation of project costs using historical data and earned value analysis

• Development of work breakdown structure (WBS) using database systems

• Development of the project schedule using historical data and lessons learned

• Management of resources using actual resource usage data from similar projects

Technology facilitates interaction among the project team members, encourages discussions, and promotes the flow and collection of knowledge. Technology, specifically KM, promotes communication, employee skills, collaboration, decision making, and productivity. Consequently, technology (IT and KM) helps project leaders promote project performance, team development, and competency.

Furthermore, the team management and leadership process (Figure 3.3), discussed earlier, can be enhanced by combining with the use of technology tools (Figure 3.7).

While technology facilitates defining roles, responsibilities, and processes, it also promotes knowledge sharing, team development, efficiency, and effectiveness. However, motivating factors that can lead to knowledge sharing, team development, building competencies, and innovation are dependent on the project leadership role in establishing trust and open communication. It is here that technology plays the critical supporting role. However, one caveat to remember is that technology is not a panacea for resolving all the challenges associated with PM.

Using technology requires technical skills, and project team members must be trained to use the technology effectively. Although technology offers gains in efficiency and effectiveness, one must remember that both the sets of technical skills and people skills are necessary and important, and that a shortfall in either can lead to a shortfall in overall performance.

Figure 3.7 Technology process

Team Knowledge Management Process

Project management processes are essentially designed to be obvious and prominent. KM processes, often obscure, are integrated with project management processes to help individual and organizational learning, and provide a platform for training new people.

Developing, sharing, and retaining knowledge are part of the KM repertoire. Ultimately, leveraging this knowledge for the benefit of the organization and project teams is a critical aspect of KM. Leveraging knowledge is often manifested in learning at individual and organizational levels. Improving existing processes and implementing new processes often serve as visible evidence of organizational learning.

Akin to project management processes that are aimed to produce services, products, and results are the KM processes that are expected to create, share, and deploy knowledge within the organization and with external stakeholders. One of the important goals of a KM process is to convert tacit knowledge into organizational explicit knowledge and make it available in the right format and context to facilitate learning at individual and organizational levels. KM deals with two activities:

• Preserving and using existing knowledge, and

• Creating new knowledge for effective use

Existing knowledge includes both tacit and explicit knowledge. Creating new knowledge involves a great deal of formal and informal interaction of people with the processes and among people within the organization, which underlines the importance of developing formal and informal KM processes.

Documenting personal knowledge in some form is one of the means to share knowledge. It becomes explicit knowledge, an intellectual asset that can be shared as information within the organization. Technology plays an important supporting role in sharing knowledge, specifically in global virtual project teams.

Information exchange, one of the goals of KM, promotes collective knowledge. Organizations make people aware of the impact that their engagement in information exchanges can have on the performance of others. Another intervention is to foster cooperation by enhancing a sense of group identity and personal responsibility among team members.

Improved communication, enhanced collaboration, improved employee skills, better decision making, and improved productivity are identified as the most useful outcomes of KM⁶ and all of these outcomes are of critical importance for project teams. These benefits can be identified to develop knowledge-sharing and learning processes for projects (Figure 3.8).

Figure 3.8 proposes information exchange among people within and across business processes, within and across disciplines and functions of project management to facilitate knowledge sharing and learning from each other. Furthermore, this process will facilitate the measurement of knowledge sharing among the project team members, within and across project management processes; within and across project functions; and with employee skills at task, process, project, and organization levels. Consequently, this process can facilitate individual and organizational learning.

Figure 3.8 Knowledge-sharing process

KM functions such as storing, sharing, transferring, and converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and facilitating organizational learning are some of the important responsibilities of the project management office (PMO).

Team Learning Process

Potential savings in cost and time could be significant if organizations do not resort to reinventing the wheel every time a new project is initiated. It is common knowledge that the project team can reduce project cost and duration by learning from past mistakes and making use of successful practices.

Research has shown that these lessons are not captured for various reasons (Table 3.2). Organizations must eliminate these reasons and consider incentive schemes and rewards for the project team to encourage continuous capturing of lessons learned throughout the project.

Table 3.2 Learning inhibitors

Reason	Explanation
Lack of time	Project resources are not given the time to complete lessons learned.
Lack of resources	Once the resource finishes the project task, the resource is assigned to other tasks or projects.
Lack of clear guidelines	Company processes and procedures are not well defined or enforced.
Lack of incentive	Although much effort goes into meetings, documentation, and reporting of lessons learned, the project resources are not recognized for their efforts.
Lack of management support	Functional managers and management do not see the benefit of capturing lessons learned and do not support efforts allowing their employees to participate in lessons-learned meetings and forums.

Source: Trevino and Anantatmula (2008).

The first two reasons in Table 3.2 are rooted in the management action, and the rest are the consequences of the lack of support on the part of senior management toward lessons learned. Assigning resources to another project immediately after completing a project reflects an efficient use of resources in the short term but is not an effective use of resources overall.

It is a usual practice for an organization to capture lessons learned after completing the project. However, it is desirable to capture lessons throughout the project life cycle and not just at the completion of the project (Figure 3.9), as timely capture of the information would improve project performance.

To capture lessons learned throughout the project execution, the project manager plays an important role in creating and nurturing a learning environment for capturing, analyzing, storing, disseminating, and reusing lessons learned from projects. Lessons learned should include both success and failure stories, which is not possible without establishing trust among the project team members.

With the approach depicted in Figure 3.9, the project manager and project team would seek support from peers in the organization before the project is started in order to learn and ascertain likely challenges of the project such as complexity, uncertainty, and unknowns associated with similar projects. Furthermore, the team would refer to the lessons-learned databases and select relevant and promising project management practices.

Figure 3.9 Project learning process

While planning and executing the project, the project manager and the team would, on a daily basis, address the following questions at the end of each day:

• What was supposed to happen?

• What actually happened?

• What is the reason for the deviation?

• What can be done about it?

A rigorous and sincere effort to address these questions would help the team review plans and make amends as necessary. This approach helps the project team to recognize early warning signals and take timely corrective actions, thereby preventing cost and time overruns. This provides a basis for developing a better rationale for terminating runaway projects.

Learning while doing should not be time consuming as these questions are addressed on a daily basis. Meetings to address these questions should be short with a clear agenda. Learning after completing the project remains an important step in this process as the project manager and the team will have the benefit of a complete and comprehensive understanding of what went wrong and what went right. The experience and lessons learned will help knowledge sharing and enhance knowledge repositories. This approach would also help in carving out expertise and interest areas of project management practices and in developing communities of practices for continuous sharing of knowledge.

From a project team’s perspective, a robust and effective learning process (Figure 3.10) would motivate team members to collaborate with others as it would help individuals in the team in their personal and professional growth. In this manner, team members learn from each other, achieve greater work satisfaction, improve morale, and increase productivity.

As shown in Figure 3.10, captured lessons must be analyzed to extract information that would be relevant for future projects and the current project. Once relevant information is recorded, technology that is used for storage should be easy and simple to store, access, and retrieve.

Figure 3.10 Projects lessons learned cycle

Questions:

1. Explain the difference between team processes and taskwork.

2. What characteristics does a leader need to effectively guide his team through the development process?

3. What technologies would be more appropriate for traditional project teams?

4. What technologies would be more appropriate for virtual project teams?

5. Explain effective ways to integrate project management and knowledge management disciplines.

6. What are the benefits of integrating knowledge management with project management?

7. How can a project leader implement the lessons learned in continuous life cycle?

__________________

¹ Bowers, Braun, and Morgan (1997, 90).

² Tuckman (1965).

³ Marks, Mathieu, and Zaccaro (2001).

⁴ Marks, Mathieu, and Zaccaro (2001).

⁵ Whetten and Cameron (2007).

⁶ Anantatmula (2005).