Guidelines Please respond to the following: Classmate Before you begin, take a moment to appreciate the power of teamwork and how you can best utilize this tool. Consider the result you want and the tasks you think are required to achieve it. As you think about your employees, match their skills to the tasks of the project, but also identify personalities you feel complement one another. A successful team project maximizes the talents of its individual members, but the true power of teamwork comes from the groups cohesion and combined energies focused on a common goal. If you want your team to be really effective, youll need to get the right people for the job. If possible, try to incorporate employees or departments in your organization that bring varied experience and perspective to the project. If, for example, youre trying to come up with a new way to track customer satisfaction using new social media tools, then be sure to include employees who represent sales, information technology, customer service, and more. Try to choose people for your team who together will provide a broad perspective on your project. Once youve chosen your team and outlined your expectations, the authority and access the team needs to complete the project. Industrious, energetic, and creative people will become frustrated very quickly if they do not have the freedom, access to tools, and other resources they need to complete their work. Once you have set forth your guidelines, your job becomes making sure they can do theirs. Avoid telling members of a team what to do and how to do it. Instead, work with them to set goals, and then remove obstacles, grant access, and provide the support your team needs to achieve those goals. In an ideal world, youll have chosen exactly the right people for the team, and everything will take care of itself. In the real world, you will have to verify that the team is working well together and that the project is on track. Provide, as necessary, a forum where you and the team can share concerns, successes, and project status on a regular basis. If necessary, you may find you need to assign a team leader, or redefine the project and reassign roles. As much as possible, however, try to let the team work through its own challenges. When a team identifies, addresses, and pushes through obstacles on its own, individuals draw closer together, and their success gives rise to confidence and camaraderie. When your team accomplishes or exceeds its goals, then be sure to recognize the win and celebrate it. At minimum, schedule a final team meeting where you can collectively and describe the positive impact their work will have on your organization and your customers. One hallmark of an outstanding team is camaraderie. The teams success will build on itself, and your team and your organization will be the better for it as the team takes on more responsibility. People frequently ask if there is an optimum staffing level for a software development project? At one extreme, the number of people could be below a critical mass and the project is vulnerable to the loss of a key person. Very small teams are also highly dependent on the skills of the individual. At the other extreme, large teams experience human communication complexities. Large teams quickly gravitate toward the average skill set of the group. Somewhere in the middle there should be an optimum situation. So, the quick and dirty answer to the question is; yes there is an optimum team size, but it is dependent on a number of variables. Some obvious variables are:
