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You are a new project manager and you’ve been assigned to assemble your first project team. How do you do it?
The vetting process for your team is something that isn’t necessarily taught, but is important. Good interviewing skills are necessary.
The first important step in the interview process is you.
It is vital to know what does and doesn’t work for you. In this way, you can tailor your team for a custom fit. Using your strongest and weakest skills as a guideline, you determine what is essential to building your project team.
Samantha Bethke, PMP, a project manager and author of a Knowledge Shelf article on recruiting, said, “I like to surround myself with people who are smarter than me. If I had all the answers, I wouldn’t need a team.”
If your difficulty is in documenting and tracking progress, perhaps you should seek a project coordinator. If your weak area is technical, possibly look for a technical architect or technical lead.
Seeking those with specific skill sets creates a solid foundation for your project management plan to succeed. Building on that foundation creates an effective plan that establishes teamwork and trust while decreasing risk.
Before the interviews begin, know what your prerequisites are and be clear about those definitions. This will help to narrow your search and save time.
Recruiters aren’t going to necessarily know what you need. Communicating your needs may help in the vetting process, but you will still need to accept or reject résumés.
Once the candidate list has been narrowed down, take the time to review the résumés and make notes, such as specific questions you’d like to ask. These questions fall into two categories: Basic questions asked of every candidate, and questions specific to each candidate’s résumé.
By reviewing the résumés, you become adept at recognizing which ones fit your criteria and which ones don’t. Some résumés appear strong but the candidate doesn’t, while there are other candidates with weak résumés but who turn out to be excellent team members.
Narrowing your choices to two candidates helps you define the three to five chief skills you’re seeking. One of the candidates will validate your decision.
After hiring the candidate, the interview continues.
This is when you can determine if the new hire meets your expectations of what you envisioned him or her to be. You recognize how he or she works and determine how well he or she will work with your team and your project plan.
Follow your instincts about a candidate and don’t give into pressures. This isn’t something that can necessarily be taught, but if that “deeper” feeling inside you doesn’t sit well, listen to it.
A good project manager has a plan, considers all the facts, and trusts that his or her skills, experience, and instinct will guide him or her in building a great team and delivering a successful project.
Identify key participants by name and how they will work together. Using the roles as a guide, choose individuals who can best perform those duties, based on their training, skills,
Personality and habits. In high-performance teams, the skills of all members are complementary.
Determine whether the entire team will handle the project start to finish, or if certain members will participate only at specific stages.
Depending on the complexity of the work, you may need to draw team members from outside the firm. Project legal professionals are a good option, particularly if expertise is required that doesn’t exist in-house or if pending workload spikes could overburden core team members.
Agree with the answers of all experts. Mr. Wolf Klaas Kinsbergen & Mr. Vinod Jetley explained the steps elaborate.
Step1: Define Your Goals
The first step is simple: Decide where you are going. Decide what your team’s goals are. Decide what the purpose or mission is. This is required and critical, because only when you clearly know what goals you are trying to achieve do you have a reasonable chance of reaching them.
Ask yourself: are we launching a new product? Are we managing a time-sensitive project? Will our success be determined by our ability to manage cost, hit timelines, expand creativity, or something else entirely? What are we trying to accomplish, and how will we know if we have been successful? We must start here; this decision will shape nearly everything else that’s done in the team-building process.
Step2: Identify the Necessary Skills
Once you know where you want the team to go, you then need to profile the skill sets that individual members need to possess to achieve the goals. You should notice here that we are not yet talking about naming candidates. Discussing names of potential team members too early in the process can be dangerous and counterproductive. Doing so can lead to conscious or subconscious decisions on whom we want before we are sure that person is the correct fit.
You can have an incredibly talented individual with a great attitude who would not be a good fit on your team for other reasons. So, no names yet. The second step is about focusing on the skills you’ll need to accomplish your goals. As a starting point, we recommend completing the following sentence: “If we are going to reach our goals, we will really need a person or people who can ______.”
Step3: Identify the Necessary Behaviors
So now you know where you are going and the skills you will need to get there. But we’re still not ready to discuss names. When building a new team from the beginning, you also need to profile the correct behaviors. That “perfect” candidate with the right skills might also be difficult to work with, or might be a terrible communicator, or slow on meeting deadlines.
And if you decide those behaviors are important to your success, then that “perfect” candidate may turn out to be not so perfect after all. So, in addition to profiling the skills you’ll need, you should also profile the behaviors that will be conducive to creating a positive team dynamic.
Step4: Identify the Rules and Expectations
Now that you know where you want to go, and what skills and behaviors you want potential team members to possess, it’s time to start setting some ground rules for your team. We believe it is important to establish some norms for how your team will work together, and set some expectations for what it means to be part of the team. This framework can serve to create team agreement on how you will treat each other, work together, communicate, plan, meet and so forth.
This step has two major benefits. First, such an agreement framework can be used to screen potential team members. It essentially asks them, “Are you willing to be a part of this?” And second, once your team is formed and is moving forward, you can return to these pre-established rules and expectations to solve any issues, disagreements or problems that arise.
Step5: Start Naming Names
With your goals, skills, behaviors, rules and expectations defined, it’s time to name the people who will fit within your team. Following steps one through four should allow your search to be logical and focused since you know what you’re looking for.
I’m always intrigued by how often that “perfect” candidate everyone wanted to talk about at the beginning turns out to be not so perfect at this stage in the game – and how often we end up considering someone we never would have considered otherwise.
Step6: Create Agreement on the Team Plan
Once you have named your team, the last step is to bring everyone together and communicate a number of things. We coach our clients to communicate all the steps they have taken in the building of their teams, and why they took them. Why? We believe it is important for people on the team to understand the goals, the skills and behaviors that were profiled ahead of time, and what the team rules and expectations are.
Find out the key skills of the team members, assign proper roles, assign goals and targets, assign schedule, monitor the team properly.
I agree with the good answers by Mr. Kinsbergen and Mr. Jetley.
Agree with Mr Vinod
I agree with Mr Vinod Jetley,
The first important step in the interview process is you. ... In this way,you can tailor your team for a custom fit. ... Once the candidate list has been narrowed down, take the time to review the résumés and make notes,
Assembling a project team is an effective way to handle a case or matter, but setting it ... The success of the project largely depends on whether you've ... An essential step... independently or will any of its activities overlap with those managed by ... It takes a fair amount of experience and wisdom as a team leader to know ...
I would combine answers from Mr. Vinod and Mr. Wolf.
Both have identified very good points;
Skill Requirement Assessment, and interviewing are two main points in forming a team among so many others.
I would critically assess the project scope and will identify the required skill set, and then will start interviewing people (internal and external) subject matter experts.
In forming a team, assessing required behaviours is also very important area.
Creative & Potential staff crew aong with technical highly qualified members for each dep
