Arena

The concept of team work, and project teams, is an interesting one, particularly as there can be more combinations of teams than there are people. As this will be a series of posts on the topic I shall start this one with laying the foundation for some of the reasoning later.

I ended my old article, Excellence – Teamwork or flying Solo, with the following statement:

Point being, if you have a well-oiled team, who knows each other and each others skills, and who trust each other, the chance of innovation, of improvising and experimenting on the fly when things you predicted didn’t really materialise, this can take you to (greater) places no plan could have foreseen.

Worst case scenario will be that you did everything in your power with the best talent you could find, which should be a whole lot better than quite a few alternatives.

Now, let us have a look at Project Team composition, how and why it can be so completely “right” one time, but also how and why it can go so completely wrong at other times. When a project team goes not-so-well as well it normally leaves chaos, disaster and/or general unhappiness behind. Please note that I am talking about Project teams here, not departments. I shall touch on the difference later, but for now, let’s have a look at what makes people in great teams to become great, and lets start looking at it from the perspective of a music band, just because I can.

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