Effective Software Project Management

Appendix I. Organizing the Project Team

When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.

—Joe Paterno Football Coach, Penn State University

Appendix Learning Objectives

After reading this appendix, you will be able to: Understand the tools of an effective team Organize the project team

Note

Most of the material in this appendix is an abridged version of Chapter 9 of my earlier work: Effective Project Management: Traditional, Adaptive, Extreme, Third Edition (Wiley, 2003). It is presented here for completeness so that this book may be used as a text for an introductory course in software project management. For courses requiring more detail on these topics, the earlier work may be used as a companion text.

Every team is different. They may be coming together for the first time and not much more that a group of people, or they may have worked on several projects in the past and are a lean, mean fighting machine. Typically they are somewhere in between these two extremes. In any case it is the project manager that must bring them together into an effective and efficient working team.

Project teams all too often fail to define and agree on the team operating rules. These operating rules define how the team works together, makes decisions, resolves conflicts, reports progress, and deals with a host of other administrative chores.

There are several areas to consider when you create the operating rules that govern how the team conducts ...