Developing self sustained teams in traditional project management methodology

The biggest challenge for a functional manager or a project manager in a traditional project is the way team works. Every leader would like to have a team which is self-sustained, focused, collaborated, with ideal emotional intelligent and mainly goal oriented. With the timelines being months away, the focus and the customer centric aspects deteriorate over time.

Managers must identify the strengths and weakness of the team members and encourage them to develop the skill set which could help them as well as the organization.

Here are some of the activities which can help a team moving from a normal team to self-sustained team:

Daily stand-ups

              A daily standup of 10 to 15 minutes where in the 3 golden statements followed in the agile methodology can be applied. This will ensure that the team is focused on progress and is improving on day to day basis.

 Cross functional teams

              Involving team members in activities for other modules/projects would bring new ideas to the project and help the manager to address any unknown crisis in terms of unplanned leave, scope creeps, changed priorities.

Monthly workshops

              Monthly workshops can also be used for idea generation, skill upgrades, knowledge sharing sessions can help teams to develop technical and soft skills. This would provide a platform to showcase the strengths of the individuals in the team. This is part of Design of Experiments where feasible study of different approaches would be performed, and team can debate/ weight each approach and then select the best one suited for their team

Managers can take away the key points and develop a goal-oriented plan for everyone which can be accomplished during an agreed time frame.

Involvement in requirements decomposition

              As a manager, the onus is to get the team involved in the project as early as possible. This would ensure that the team understands the project and align themselves to organization goal. Manager must ensure that the client focus is upheld throughout the project and any functionality which is of least value to be replaced by the ones which add more value.

Open team culture

The team culture should be such that any suggestions and ideas should be encouraged. The open-door policy would allow the team members to discuss their ideas freely with the manager.

Impact analysis

              Involving the team members in impact analysis can help the organization as well as the team to know the different modules/projects getting affected due to the upcoming changes/defect which is identified.

The expert opinion can help the project reduce the turn around time as well as quality product being delivered to the end customer.

Ownership

              Each person in a team feels privileged when they have ownership of the deliverable. The approach we performed above (Strengths and Weakness identification) can be adapted here and suitable ownership can be assigned.