Effective Project Team and Resource Allocation
Organise Project Structure and Assign Project Resource to Tasks
Jan 14, 2009
Forming a project team should be a deliberate act where people are considered in terms of the skills and experience they bring and their motivation to participate and contribute to the project as an active member of the team. In addition, they must be committed to the project objectives and have a clear sense of urgency and accountability to get things done as and when needed.
Organise Project Structure
Building a project team is a combination of selecting individuals and assigning them to project roles within an overall project structure. A project manager must ensure that:
- Project roles and responsibilities must be clearly defined, preferably with no overlap of accountabilities. Only one person should be accountable for one thing or multiple things, although any number of people may contribute towards it. Two or more people should never be accountable for the same thing as this leads to confusion and potential problems
- Roles must be organised into a project structure with clear lines of accountabilities and if appropriate who reports to whom or who are the leaders with sub teams within the overall project structure
- Individuals must be assigned to the roles, with the ideal being 100% resource allocation. As the level of resource committed to the project falls the project manager must compensate for the time-splitting and therefore reduced level of productivity due to task switching or, worse, conflicting priorities. Usually, one individual is assigned to one role but it is possible for one role to be performed by multiple people
- A clear and current project organogram is created of the project team. It must be updated if the project team changes
- Extended or external project team relationships should be drawn in relation to the project team as a single entity and includes other entities such as vendors or third-party suppliers. In essence this is drawing the lines of communication between the project team and all stakeholders and is useful as an aid to transparency
Project Resource and Project Team Size
"Keep the team small if you can - preferably fewer than 20 members," according to Steven R. Meier in Building and Managing an Effective Project Team. It is well known that as the number of project resources increases so does the communication complexity. Large teams may be necessary so again the project manager should ensure that detailed project planning compensates for the increased need for communication and coordination between the team members.
Effective Project Team and Resource Allocation
Effective project teams are based on the right people being organised into a good project structure. Project resource allocation can contribute towards success by having dedicated project team members that are not matrix managed or split between multiple projects or responsibilities. If practical realities mean that resource allocation is less than 100% then the project manager must compensate for this as part of the detailed planning and time allocation.
