Effective team- and project management
Research and study are often organised as a group activity. In order
to work effectively as a member of a group on a project, management
skills are a mandatory element of a skill profile. Acquiring and applying
management skills, however, is more difficult to achieve because they
consist of a mixture of input as well as output characteristics. The
effectiveness of a ‘manager’ depends on the behaviour and
interests of the group members, and vice versa. Managing a group always
represents s a balancing act between diverging individual interests,
competencies and temperaments. The diversity of a group, however, is
almost always a necessary – but not sufficient - condition for
success. Groups of ‘friends’ are notoriously ineffective;
groups of people with the same skill profile often clash or end up in
apathy. So the fact that groups are often made up of ‘colleagues’
- people who do not have to like each other in order to collaborate
– is not necessarily bad. But collaboration between colleagues
requires different skills than when you work with friends. Project groups
run into problems when the two identities get mixed up. Or when you
aim at acting like friends in a group, whereas a more colleague-like
attitude would be more professional and effective - a problem that many
students face when they collectively try to work on an assignment. Mastering
management and study skills – combined in acts of ‘doing
it yourself’ – have greater learning effects than any of
the other skills contained in this Skill Sheet collection.
This requires that you be prepared to go through the reflective cycle
of effective project management, and that you always take into account
the following five phases (Guirdham, 1990):
1 Forming – the appropriate team
2 Storming – taking the adequate time for brainstorming over possible
dimensions (causes as well as consequences) of the project
3 Norming – deciding on the basis of more or less objective ‘norms’
4 Performing – implementing it
5 Adjourning – the team can be adjourned, provided they performed
well
