Teamwork in Project Management Essay
- What “management techniques” are your team using to ensure that all members contribute to a successful project?
Planning, organizing and delegating roles are significant in managing teams when undertaking a project. The success of the attributes mentioned above depends on the choice of management techniques the manager decides to put in place to ensure that all members subscribe to the goal and mission of the project. It is essential that the manager communicates the purpose and roles expected of the members to avoid conflicts that arise during the process. These conflicts affect the team and it might be unable to meet development process leading to delays or cancellations of orders placed by the clients. However, consideration is also important when it comes to delegating as it ensures that every person involved has a role to play. By specializing in the activities, it becomes useful to track errors and areas of improvement. During the project of our client, different management techniques were put to use.
Program Evaluation Review Technique: During the project management period, the initiation technique helps to introduce members to the task ahead. It is from here that members get to know about the challenge facing the client and the solutions needed to address the concern. After understanding the needs of the clients, members are tasked with giving their opinions about the observations of the client’s working environment to plan the activities that can initiate the project. This is a collective technique that helps to introduce project members to the client and engage them about possible changes that can increase output. Brainstorming is something important when building relationships since it brings ideas together and this is being used in the project to build the scope of ideas (Hoffer, Jeffrey, George and Valacich 67). Moreover, this management technique fosters relationships between the customer and the team as the expectations of the client are understood. Hence, each member plays a role in the pilot study to understand the needs the customer might have.
Getting the scope to every member of the team is a management technique that is effective by establishing communication channels with the members. This should not be a one-way approach that orders only have to come from above. In this case, during discussion ideas are suggested about the best way to go about the problems facing the client and how each member would overcome them. It is from this that members can profile the company and decode it to the most feasible plan. By understanding the operating environment, managing the members of the team take into consideration that each person can have an approach to solve the problem. In management, people having opinions requires efficient monitoring and having a sit down with each member can highlight their process for the project. Consequently, this leads to the elimination of some members if they have different expectations; however, in our team, ideology meetings are an efficient approach to table issues and contribute solutions.
Troubleshooting the challenges is a technique used when helping members overcome errors and, in this case, it helps to collect both negative and positive responses. Given that the project is phased out in segments errors cannot be avoided, but is how the team chooses to handle the9m. It is crucial that all members can learn from the problem to help them in coming up with better ideas. With the help of slack members can brainstorm when an individual finds an issue. This is one approach that we have used in the project to build the confidence of members identifying areas of improvement and asking them to take the lead on implementing (Hoffer et al. 68). As a project manager, it is essential to let team members show their talents by giving them the opportunity to develop. Notably, this discourages idleness among the team as each person plays a role in making the project successful since each one gets the credit for what they do.
Role assigning is an essential practice in management as it helps in dealing with the tasks. This where the agile method comes into play as a breakdown of the tasks helps members to concentrate on a specific section to ensure that it meets the goals of the project before moving onto another. The structure is important since it eases progression when it comes to the tasks. In this case, members can be divided into groups and assigned a role. This can be looking at the internal or external challenges the business is encountering, or it is likely to face even after the completion of the project. Besides, it is during this time that risk and their sources can be determined which helps in calibrating solutions (Hoffer et al. 69). Using the PERT technique helps to set the project deadline, which is essential to meeting the needs of the customers. Therefore, this technique is effective, since all members play a role.
Critical Path Scheduling: Task sequencing is crucial when it comes to determining the priority levels of each undertaking. With the help of slack, it is possible to understand the percentage of each task in the project since members keep on updating the chat through to ensure effective communication and also address concerns when they arise. During this moment, the pairing individuals into teams help to loosen up the mood as new ideas are brought in due to the changes. This helps in defining the problem from another perspective, making sure that everyone can dissect the problem. Using the critical path technique defining the roles creates phases through which tasks can be completed as this allows consultations to take place. That is when the slack tool of communication comes into play as the platform allows the team to make suggestions and get to address the concerns of members.
It is not only about work, during the project. As an approach to keep the mood in the team vibrant, inspirational and motivational time plays a role in inducing resilience among team members. In project management, fatigue due to the repetitiveness of the circle of operations wears down individuals and regaining their motivation becomes a challenge when managers cannot find solutions. However, to ensure the success of the project, members were encouraged to share inspirational stories, jokes, prospects and chat among each other a way of building connections and staying motivated. These are some of the mechanisms induced by individuals to help solve task-oriented issues. Given that some tasks depend on each other, encouraging the completion of the initial task sets the pace to complete the others (Hoffer et al. 71). It is expected of members to take records of the activities completed on each section of the project to assist in finding areas where for help is required to eliminate issues of delay. Besides, it also opens the room to individual pairing with a senior and junior to address the issue from different perspectives.
Getting the attention of users to focus on the result during their use of the system requires members to integrate training manuals and equipment to assist with this aspect. To keep the attention of the members, this called for participation of different role players in designing layouts for the system to ensure that the shift from manual systems to the online-based system would facilitate the needs of tracking customer activities to embed in the needs of the business. By recording client data, application system formatting can follow the standard format of making it a reduction in the errors made, which team members can overcome by tracking the process path to identify the critical analysis of the problem. With the help of the Gantt chart, aligning the roles of each member to the task and the period of accomplishing it retains the ability to keep everyone focused on accomplishing the task. This helps the team manager to address any delays by assigning the pending tasks to teams ahead of others. It is essential to run concurrent processes as it eliminates errors since members can use different techniques to ensure inclusion during system navigation (Hoffer et al. 74). Notably, by applying functional analysis, the development process can integrate user-based interfaces that provide a wide selection of alternatives for validate of usability. Therefore, keeping the team focused on the task of providing user-focused system depends on the choice of techniques in addressing the challenges encountered during the development process.
- Many of the aspects of systems analysis and design are user focused. Describe how your group has maintained this focus.
The focus is an essential aspect of system designing and analysis since it considers the interests of the user. For this to happen, it is crucial to address the problem and the expectations of the system to ensure that the needs of the user are facilitated. The priority in meeting these standards come from the customer who has to address the concern to the developer to ensure that the design meets the expectations and the resources at hand can facilitate the success of the project. It is also crucial to align the goals of the business or organization with individual expectations when undertaking the procedure of the design (Hoffer et al. 383). Provision of essential information about the perspective the user has on the system has to be addressed before the process escalates. Hence, a system can be designed to meet the expectations of the user as long as the correct information is provided from the start.
Interactions: Maintaining the users focus during the project was not an individualistic role, but a team effort which entailed constant communication with the client. From the first instance of the meeting, the client was able to address the needs to be addressed by the system, and this laid a foundation for each member to outsource an idea that matched what the customer was looking for and what the end-user would expect from the system. Being in a position to engage different members ensured that the problem was revised and discussed to ensure that the right path was being followed. As said, the input of the client reviewing the finished steps was crucial to meets identifying areas of concern and aspects that required to improve before the final product was handed over. Holding the interactive meetings with team members and the stakeholders helped to highlight the perspectives of the users and they look forward to engaging with the system. Therefore, members remained focused due to the constant reminders from the customer about the specifics of user needs expected from the product.
Consistency: The success of a system is based on its ability to provide the same services without changing or deviating from the expectations of the users. In trying to keep the team focused on the expectations of the user, the project design was made available, and all designers ensured reference. Integrating this with the input of the customer about areas that might need the changes, members kept on making adjustments to meet the needs and also ensure that simple codes were used for easy user accessibility. Due to the specialization of activities, the team’s communication channel of slack was always at hand to offer an in-house assist to members where they faced a challenge or an error. With this mechanism, different approaches were used to address a concern from a team and help them to align the specifications to the demands of the system (Hoffer et al. 387). This ensured that members with specific abilities in solving a concern would offer help to their counterparts to ensure that the system process aligned and not an aspect was lagging.
Meetings and Sharing: As a team, it was important to meet, and this was weekly besides the communicating interactions maintained through slack and the sharing of files through google drive. It was during these meetings that the team would revisit the expectations, and members talk about concerns as well as the risks the system was liable to during the period of design. The importance behind these meetings was to give an account of each member’s role and reaffirm commitment to addressing the concerns of the user. Besides, during this time members would take the lead in giving their prospect and user-based knowledge on how to address some aspects of the system to meet the demands of the clients. With this in mind, brainstorming ideas from previous systems and those similar to the under developing gave the team a grading level to consider when making the necessary alterations to the project (Hoffer et al. 389). As a result, the meetings were a way of reassuring the members about their commitment to address what the end user was expecting.
Feedback: The team was able to stay focused on the needs of the user by using feedback information from the online studies and engage the business’s clientele. From the scope provided by the users, some attributes indicated the firm’s need to meet and easy accessibility, which is always a priority for end users. Taking the lead as members who would need the same services it was the team’s role to come up with design changes that would foster the end user being in an interactive mode with the system. For this to happen confirmation at different levels of design could allow members to proceed with the operation as this would guarantee success. Taking this into consideration, different command prompts were established to reduce the burden of repeating control commands to the system (Hoffer et al. 390). As a result, the help from members helped in maintaining their focus since they were always giving feedback about the potential changes that would benefit the project.
User-Based Error Identification: Keeping a team focused is not a simple task during a project. Given that in most cases the needs required to be met are many, errors are bound to limit progress. During the system process, directing team members was one way to keep them focused on the task at hand. Minimizing errors can be made achieved by setting goals for each person to act as a guideline to ensure that individuals can meet the expectations. Overcoming errors among team members can effectively be avoided by the evaluation performance. The reports of the reviews help in identifying areas of concern and ensure that these are addressed to set the goal right for members to work on the weak points. In most cases dealing with such low pointers in the system can help in eliminating delays since correcting errors can consume time and increase costs (Hoffer et al. 392). However, as a team, it was upon each one to offer solutions and assistance where it was needed. This ensured that errors were limited and focus turned to develop a system capable of engaging users through their definitions.
It was also crucial for the team to know the kind of users expected to use the system as this would help in determining the usability experience. The challenge shifts from development and turns to the response users will have with the operating system since it has to provide a secure mode of communication. This focuses on the level of English or language users will encounter and meeting these needs could only come from the business’s frequent customers as well as the pioneer as it would be advantageous to know how the system works. On that note, the team focused on designing services the end-user would consider to have significant usability. Therefore, the use of natural language keys the interaction process between the user and the system as it eases entry.
It is getting the attention of users to focus on the result during their use of the system requires members to integrate training manuals and equipment to assist with this aspect. To keep the attention of the members, this called for participation of different role players in designing layouts for the system to ensure that the shift from manual systems to an online based system would facilitate the needs of tracking customer activities to embed in the needs of the business. By recording client data, application system formatting can follow the standard format of making it a reduction in the errors made, which team members can overcome by tracking the process path to identify the critical analysis of the problem. With the help of the Gantt chart, aligning the roles of each member to the task and the period of accomplishing it retains the ability to keep everyone focused on accomplishing the task. This helps the team manager to address any delays by assigning the pending tasks to teams ahead of others. It is crucial to run concurrent processes as it eliminates errors since members can use different techniques to ensure inclusion during system navigation. Notably, by applying functional analysis, the development process can integrate user-based interfaces that provide a wide selection of alternatives for validate of usability. Therefore, keeping the team focused on the task of providing user-focused system depends on the choice of techniques in addressing the challenges encountered during the development process.
Work Cited
Hoffer, Jeffrey A., George, Joey F., and Valacich, Joseph S. Modern Systems Analysis and Design (7th Ed). New York: Pearson. 2014. Pp. 553.