Team collaboration is a big deal. Teams that work well together get a lot more done than similar teams that don’t—faster, better, more efficiently. And they have a much better time doing it. There are a lot of books and courses that deal with improving team collaboration. The question is, where do you start?
One place you can start with a project team is with a common framework that gives you a platform that allows your team a common perspective for talking about what you’re accomplishing together. In other words, a project schedule.
A project schedule needs a few characteristics to improve your team’s collaboration:
- It must show the team what’s more and less important in the project work. In other words, it must provide reasonable priorities.
- It must be credible to all team members. If people don’t believe it, they won’t use it. That means two things:
- It must incorporate enough of reality to set priorities. You may decide to add more detail than that, but beware: too much detail can be a trap that sucks away time and energy.
- It must be built by team members. For small projects (under fifteen people), you can involve everyone in the scheduling process. For larger projects, you need to involve people the team members trust, people who will impart credibility.
- It must be credible to senior management. This way, you have a tool with which to discuss and justify timing and resourcing decisions.
- The team must keep it up-to-date. This means it can’t have so much detail that you spend all your time trying to keep it current when things change or progress is made.
- You need a regular (at least weekly) team meeting to discuss where the project is and what the schedule is telling you. We call this the “Progress Meeting.” It is described in the ProChain University Basics program [link].
If you want to find out more about our Fusion Online scheduling process, contact us [link] or check out ProChain University [link].
Atlassian post: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/the-importance-of-teamwork
Teams unleashed: https://www.amazon.com/Teams-Unleashed-Release-Power-Potential-ebook/dp/B07Q21RJL5/
