From the course: Leading Projects

How to structure a project team

From the course: Leading Projects

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How to structure a project team

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- A famous quote that applies really well to business actually comes from science. "It's not the strongest or the most intelligent "who will survive but those who can best manage change." In this video, we're going to see who needs to be involved in your project for it to be successful. What does an organization do when it needs to change? It creates a project. To be precise about it, the Project Management Institute describes a project as, "A temporary endeavor undertaken "to create a unique product, service, or result." And projects are done by groups of people. No matter what a project is intended to create, it will also create some kind of change. And there will be a team of people assigned to do the work. So projects are key to the survival of businesses, and people are key to the success of projects. Most of the projects that I work with have an interesting characteristic. The project teams are cross-functional. In other words, the people working on the project include experts from different parts of the organization. And sometimes even people from outside the organization. For example, in supply chain projects, it's not uncommon for accountants, IT professionals, and operations managers to all work together as a project team, along with some consultants and perhaps some customers and suppliers. Most of these people probably don't know much about what's happening in those other functions, but all of them depend on each other for this project and for this team to be successful. So let's take a look at how these teams are usually organized. First there should always be a project sponsor. Who is the most senior person asking for this project to be done? Who is the one approving the budget? Assigning people to the team? And then pushing the team to deliver results? That person is the project sponsor. Next we have the project manager. The project manager helps everyone on the team keep track of what they need to do and when they need to do it. Sometimes the project manager is the boss of the team. Sometimes they're more of a coach. And other times the project manager's really a peer to the other team members. Now let's look at the functional teams. You might have one functional team focused on accounting, and others focused on IT, HR, operations, and other functions. In some cases, there can be a lot of people on a functional team. And in other cases, it may be only one or two. It really just depends on which people with which skills are needed to support the project. Each functional team requires some management, though. So each of these teams should have a single person designated as the functional team leader. The functional team leaders are often called project managers, because they're actually managing a small project within the bigger project. So a project is an initiative to create a change. It has a defined beginning and an end, and the main projects roles include the project sponsor, the project manager, functional team members, and functional team leaders. And all of them need to work together to successfully complete a project.

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