Smart Teams

Chapter 6 Collaborate: Make projects great

If you are not a project manager by trade, you could be forgiven for believing your role does not require you to plan and manage projects. Some of us think of projects as those big things that large teams work on over a period of years to deliver major products, outcomes or change.

We all work on projects. Every day of every week, consciously or not.

Projects are one of the most common ways we collaborate with one another in the workplace. Any discrete piece of work that requires several steps to complete is a project. Writing a report is a project. Planning a team offsite is a project. Developing a marketing brochure is a project. Alongside our everyday work, projects are how we get stuff done.

I recently presented at the National Partner Conference for one of the big consulting firms in Australia. The keynote address by their COO was electric. His challenge was to inspire 800 partners, who all owned their own little piece of the business, to persuade them to collaborate more and share information for the good of the client and of the firm.

One of their medium-term goals was to achieve number one market leadership in Australia. But, he explained, they could only attain that together, rather than individually. They had to get better at collaborating on opportunities and projects. I think this is true for many organisations.

This chapter is not designed to be a how-to guide to project management. Instead, my focus is on the smaller ...