This is the second article in a series about Project Team Composition. You can find links to the related articles in the series index above.
In the last article I said there are a few things a good well-oiled constantly habitually repetetive winning teams need to have:
- Complementary skills, and knowing and trusting the others will do their part
- Approximately the same skill level
- Striving for similar goals
- Mutual respect for each other, and for each others skills
Lets start going through that list in more detail, and today I am more about football than music, just so you know.
Complementary skills
This might appear obvious, but what often is overlooked is the fact that people from different backgrounds have different perceptions on various things, including what the solution should be for the problem the team is trying to solve, what their own role is within the team, as well as having different perceptions on what the others roles are within the team. If they for example never have worked within online advertising in an agency, but instead come from a financial institute, they will quickly have to figure out that developers in agencies have completely different challenges than their often bored brothers at the banks.
Beginner
This can obviously be worked around over time, if you have time that is, and people will learn what is expected of them and what they expect from others. In real live projects though, for paying clients, this can be a hard, and for the company costly, learning period.
Much like a football team has a keeper, defenders, midfielders and forwards, project teams within agencies usually need to cover the roles of project manager, designer, front-end developer, back-end developer, ActionScript and/or Flash design, information architect (or UX or HX or whatever they call themselves these days), copy writer and in some cases someone who manages the client on top of the PM/Producer. That list might fluctuate depending on the project of course, and other roles could be added to cover every eventuality, but that is missing the point of this article, so moving on…
Now, if you have those guys in your team you are doing well, but as you might remember from the paragraph on top of that, the actual guys in the team need to understand their roles within the project as well, and that is regardless of what project methodology you have decided to work towards (for example Agile/Scrum or Waterfall/Prince2).
In particular if you are going all Waterfall (which often is company wide as opposed to the odd project here and there), where the project flow is more of a relay race, the role of for example the project manager becomes crucial in updating the designers, IA’s and developers about changes in the scope, especially if they have given timings to an initial scope, as those timings may well be rendered obsolete otherwise, as “what used to be true” no longer is.
Otherwise there can, and will, be deadline unhappiness, as the designers/IA’s/developers will, quite naturally, not know what they haven’t been informed of, by the project manager who should be the hub that makes the project tick along and who has as one of the main tasks in their job description to ensure that everyone involved in a project have what they need. If you are working towards Waterfall those designers/IA’s/developers are quite possibly busy on other project as well, so to expect them to iron out possible changes in potential future projects isn’t really realistic (IMHO).
If you start pushing the need for nailing down the scope of work to for example a developer, or if you start doing copy amends during design and expect the designer to proof read and change it all, you will be on the wrong track, if nothing else because those people in those roles were thinking they were hired to do something else (like, errr, their own jobs). If you bore them enough with this they can, and will, move on to another employer where that is true.
Approximately the same skill levels
This is very often over looked, or even misunderstood, and that is a very common reason why projects can end up in a place no one would like. It really isn’t rocket science, and still people (including yours truly) at times get this wrong. It is all about balance though. In short, mixing people with different seniority and experience levels often means there will be a massive misunderstanding of the point above. The senior guys will assume the juniors know as much about their own field as the seniors know about theirs. Well…they don’t. And the junior guys will quite likely miss something that hasn’t been explicitly stated by one of the seniors because the seniors count on everyone to do at least that.
This usually leads to overcompensation from the other team members, who then get the feeling they are doing the job of at least two people. Simple example: if a junior football team get Ronaldo to play a game with them, you can bet your behind on that everyone else in the team will pass Ronaldo as often as they can. That is completely overseeing the fact that part of his normal brilliance is fast runs and being where he isn’t even supposed to physically be (in the minds of his regular opponents), so his team mates can play him when the opposing team least expects it, and instead all of a sudden he has the ball all the time, and thereby all the opposing defenders complete and full attention all the time.
Now, with Ronaldo in the junior team they might actually be able to benefit from their new weapon due to the lack of skills from the opponents, which leads me to what one of my former colleagues and dear friend usually says about other team members at work: “He/She knows just enough to be really dangerous”. What he is referring to is of course that after you have grasped a little bit of skill, you often get to a “I am INVINCIBLE!” state, and you start doing all kinds of weird mistakes, to the horror of team mates and bosses.
Ronaldo
This also means that for example Ronaldos possibly match winning appearance in a junior team, for one game (his sanity wouldn’t cope for more) can be removed completely if he is playing with the U-21 team, simply because they are good enough to be really good (though not yet at Elite level), but also often cocky and eager to prove themselves, in particular to, or compared to, players like Ronaldo. His brilliance might be completely negated due to factors that are out of his control. The only thing he knows for sure is that he, alone, can’t make a somewhat competent team into complete and constant repeat winners. He might get a good game now and then, sure, but unless the other players also are at elite level…well…again, you can probably imagine that he will not be a happy bunny.
Players like Ronaldo need the rest of the team, both his own and the opponents, to be of an appoximately same level of skill. Over the years he has changed teams as his skill level has increased. There are no reliable shortcuts and there are very few exceptions to this, regardless of if you are talking football, music or project teams. The one thing we know for sure is that top teams spur each other on to enable them all within the team to be constant winners. We also know that a good team can have a bad player just as much as we know a bad team doesn’t become good if they have one good player only.
This rounds up this second article on Project Team Composition, but there is quite a bit more to come so stay tuned. Thoughts and comments are welcome.
