Video Blog - Project Team & Delegation of Authority

hi james clements from project plan online today we're going to concentrate on project teams i'm going to give you some tips on building the project team i'm also going to look at delegating authority within a project team and then i'm going to explore the term management by walking around so building teams the two keys that i always work towards in building a team are play to your strengths and backfill around your weaknesses and secondly strategy drive structure so don't fall into the trap of

if you've got a an engineering department and a fabrication department and this department and that department you think you've got to reflect that in your project team the key is that if you've got a strategy to offshore something as part of your work breakdown structure as part of your project execution strategy you should probably have an offshore fabrication or an offshore implementation manager so strategy drive structure if you've got primary deliverables you want someone responsible for t

hat primary deliverable and you should structure your project team around it secondly building a team around your weaknesses i've worked in lots of projects where i haven't been 100 across the technology so the first thing i do is i go and try a very good engineering or technology expert to put in alongside me once you start to build the team up you should look at where you're weak in in uh in skills and in experience and so forth and build around that so you're not only trying to fill roles but

you're trying to feel experience and strengths and weaknesses so the key to delegating authority is that the person that you're delegating to must have absolute control over the outcome of the deliverable if you give someone a task to do but there's another department delivering part of the product and he has no control over that it's going to be very difficult for him to take ownership of it if he can't take ownership of it then whatever you delegate to him he's going to find an excuse why tha

t wasn't done at the end of the day so the key to delegating authority is to make sure the person you delegate to has full cost schedule quality and scope control over that deliverable so what is the term management by walking around me we can have all of these dashboards we can have all of these reports and all the data we want but the context of those reports and data is what really matters so management by walking around means you're getting out of your office you're going around you're worki

ng the project team you're talking about why things are occurring why things aren't occurring you walk around if you're building a building get out onto that building site and have a look around talk to the guy that's doing the concreting talk to the guy that's on the gate what are the problems what's he seeing every day you'll learn so much by getting out and walking around and understanding what actually is happening down on the shop floor what's happening in the design office what are the con

straints what are the problems they're having you'll learn so much more and it'll mean those data reports and dashboards will be so much more meaningful and you'll be able to write a very good report against them and you'll just know exactly what's going on