Are you thinking of adding a project team to your business for the first time? If you are then this is a terrific move that is sure to bring long term benefits.
Having said that, you may worry about the practical side of introducing a new project team. Is this going to be a huge hassle that ends up eating up far too much of your time? Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be.
Find the Right Mix of Skills
The first stage in putting together a strong project team is to get a range of skills in it. You will probably want some technical experts, good communicators and solid team players in there.
The exact skill that you need will probably depend upon the projects that you will be doing. Do you need more technical skills or is it likely that you will be relying more upon people skills to get the work carried out?
By thinking about your industry and the challenges ahead you can get a clearer idea of what overall skills you will need in your team. It can be tempting to move across experts from your business area but this can lead to a lack of expertise in technical skills, as well as putting a strain on the business area to replace them.
Give Them Their PRINCE2 Training
Assuming that not all of your new team are experienced in projects, the next step is to get them to learn what they need to know. If you are planning on using PRINCE2 methodology then you need them to go on the right courses to learn all about this approach.
The good news is that it is very easy to get to grips with this methodology. With the benefit of PRINCE2 Courses London , your new team will quickly understand the project lifecycle as well as the different techniques that they need to know.
The same applies to other popular methodologies such as Scrum, Lean and Agile. One of the big benefits with PRINCE2 is that any team members with project experience may have already used it in the past.
Help Them to Get to Know Each Other
Building a new team of any type can be hard work. If we forget about the technical aspects for a moment, getting them to work well together and trust each other can also present a number of challenges.
When you bring together a new group of colleagues it is always worth remembering the personal side of things too. Will they get along well together? Is there a good mix of personality types? Will they be able to work as a team?
It is a sensible move to let them get to know each other. This can mean arranging team building days or running some fun meetings. You can also encourage a good team atmosphere by running interesting competitions that gets them talking to each other.
Let Them Start Off Gently
No matter how good your new project team looks, it is worth starting them out gently. Don’t plunge them in at the deep end with a long and hugely complex piece of work if you can help it.
Instead, why not look for a short and snappy piece of work? A project that they can carry out from start to finish in little time will let them see the end to end process right away.
This is a clever way of letting them build up their confidence levels with a fairly short, simple project. After this, you can start slowly building up the difficulty levels so that they gain experience in more difficult pieces of work as well.
