Selecting your team: Hiring the right team for your projects

Having the right project manager is the first and a truly critical step to actual project success. But roping in the best project manager is far from enough. You need a team to get in place a strategy and plan and execution that will bring all of that together. The team should be committed to the project and must have similar vision of success.

Projects and the project managers will have serious trouble if the wrong or inadequately talented people are selected in the team. Out-of-sync leadership and inept team is a surefire way to failure.

To avoid failure, take care of the following:

1. Think Win-Win – the biggest mistake made while selecting people when creating the project charter is that we think only about the project. We consider people who have done a particular thing over and over, are considered experts and ask them to do the exact same thing yet another time. While branding this as a safe strategy, we often overlook the fact that repeated success does not leave people with any motivation to excel again. Worse still, it causes complacency. While selecting people, ensure that only the ones who can contribute and stand to gain something personally from the success of the project are selected.
2. Ensure long engagements – every person in your project should be in for the long term. This means that the team should be committed to ensuring project success. Ensure that you consider the personal gains of all the team members during the selection process.
3. Smart People – a project plan will fall apart if you do not have the right people in place. Skills of the key people will be important in ensuring high quality output.
4. Right Person for the Right Job – Identify the core strengths of the people and ensure that you put the right person for the task.
5. Use the right tools – Using the right project management tools will ensure ease of management and governance. While many tools exist within organizations, selecting and identifying the right tool will make a large difference. If nothing else, please use Microsoft Project – it still remains one of the best systems to use!

Take a Moment : Notice any movie or story about organized crime (my personal favorite is Godfather) and look at how much effort is put in while selecting the gang-members. The don always knows the levers to pull for each member of the gang and is able to get people to do what he wishes. Shouldn’t our project manager be as careful in selecting the team?