Project Team

The people needed result directly from the project activities and hence the Project Objective. You need to identify ‘project roles’ and match ‘available people’ to ‘project roles’.

Identifying ‘project roles’ involves using the project activities to decide what jobs will need to be done, and what kinds of people are needed to do these jobs. When the ‘available people’ do not match the ‘project roles’ you need to try to expand the pool of available people and/or turn away people who are not expected to make a worthwhile contribution.

There are many things that you could record about the people and roles on your project. Some useful things include skills, preferences, availability and cost.

We need to know their 'skills' so we can determine whether they can do the job that needs to be done. People will often work harder on tasks for which they have a 'preference'. Where people are operating away from their preference, you are likely to need to work harder to motivate them. 'Availability' is critical, as progressing the project efficiently involves keeping to a schedule of work. In some cases this will need to be altered to accommodate availability. In many cases there will be a 'cost'. You need to know this, and to take this knowledge and enter it into the budget you have already produced (see 5.5 Project Budget).

There are two intangible factors that can have a huge impact on project success: willingness/ability to learn and ability to work in a team environment.

'Willingness/ability to learn' is often critical on projects, as it is far easier to move people between tasks than to move people into and out of the project, and possibly back into the project later. Instead we try to do as much as possible with the people we have.

The 'ability to work in a team environment' is also critical, as the project environment is often a hot-house environment where lone wolves and solitary wombats are unlikely to thrive.

Selection for willingness/ability to learn and ability to work in a team environment is a difficult task, but far easier than getting people who do not have these attributes to work cooperatively on you project.