Tips to leading a big or dispersed project team
As an effective project leader, it’s your job to ensure all members of the project team always have access to all information pertaining to the project in question. This can be especially challenging if the project team is big, or if the project team is dispersed across the globe.
Your project team will surely appreciate these efforts:
Structured program management
When working with big a project team, it helps to employ program management, which structures and controls your project, and your project team. Make your projects less complex by using program management to create a hierarchy and turning one big project into many sub-projects. By breaking down a project, you will achieve a more controlled structure, as the decomposition will be reflected into the project team.
Layered communication
Failure for a project team to communicate effectively on complex projects can lead to grave consequences like going over-budget or missing deadlines. Layered, broken down communication ensures each project team member or department gets all the appropriate information. Ideally, all internal and external stakeholders should have access to all crucial, high-level information about the project. Each department should then receive detailed information on the aspects of the project they are responsible for, ideally through a web program that can retain and disperse detailed information.
Centralize collaboration and communicate change
Establish a collaboration tool which project team members can use to collaborate with each other no matter where they are. Online collaboration tools are advantageous; they not only allow project team members to get real-time updates on the project, they also allow you to keep a history of conversations and discussions, and build a permanent knowledge base.
Do you have any techniques that make managing a big or dispersed project team easier? Let us know!
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