 Let me tell you a little bit about me. Again, my name is Shannon Birch. I've been in the sales industry for about 15 years, and during that time I've held various roles in the sales industry. I was a sales consultant for about three to four years in the New York Metro area. I was also a sales manager for about three to four years in the New York Metro area as well. During that time I managed a large team of 35 sales consultants, and then I've held various training roles as well. I've been a trainer, a training manager, and a senior trainer as well. During that time frame I've worked on multiple projects. Most of those projects were on product development and launches based around new product launches, mostly. They were large scale projects with high visibility and they were high profile projects as well. I have a good deal of experience in the ins and outs of these types of projects, what makes them successful, and what can cause you to have some failure there as well. And I'll share some of those examples as we go throughout the session. I have a master's degree in theater arts, which I've used in many forms throughout my career in the last 15 years. I like to think of myself as an entertainer, hence why I probably ended up in the training role as well. I reside here in Boston, Massachusetts, and I'm originally from New York. Let's talk about knowing your team. It's an important part of the process in managing a project team. There are several key areas that go into knowing your team. Identifying the elements of the team, such as who are the people that are going to be on the team? How are they going to interact with each other? Are they going to work well together? Are there different things that you're going to have to do to ensure that you have a successful project team? You need to think about these things before you even start the process. Also it's important to think about interaction within a team. So those individuals have different personalities. They're going to work differently together and they're also going to interact as a group differently as well. You may have had experience with some of these individuals before. That will help you to think about this process before you even start managing the project. Some of these individuals may be unfamiliar to you and you may need to get to know them a little bit better. And we're going to talk about some of those things that you can do and how you can make that happen. Communication within a team is a vital part of the process. It's an area where you really have to spend a good deal of time thinking about how are people going to communicate with each other? It seems kind of simple, but actually you really need to think about the methods that you're going to use to communicate with each other. You're going to need to think about when that communication is going to occur. For example, when are meetings going to happen? How frequently? And then you need to also think about who is going to communicate with the customer. A lot of times in companies, they find it's more successful if you allow only one person to have contact with the customer. That one person enables the customer to have one point of contact and it eliminates any confusion. And then you've got to think about identifying standards. So how is quality going to be measured? How are you going to evaluate and measure how well the project is doing? Are you on task? Are you going to meet your goals? Is the project going to be completed on time? Thinking about all of these key areas is a vital part of the process. Knowing your team is going to help you be a successful project manager. Let's talk about identifying the elements of a team. There are two key areas when you think about identifying the elements of a team. There's the team concept and there are the team members. And we're going to talk a little bit about each one of these individually. When you think about the team, you have to realize that all of the people involved in the project, not just the actual team members, are actual elements of the team. They make up for a successful team. So you have the team members. You have the stakeholders. These are the individuals that have a very high interest in the project. And the end result really does affect them more than anybody else. And then the group or the person requesting the project is also an element of the team. Team concept. A team is a group of individuals who work together toward a successful completion of a common goal. The team members in the group can be either effective or ineffective depending on how well they work together. I can tell you that I've had some situations where I've worked on some projects and some people just didn't get along. And a lot of that was due to the fact that the project manager didn't think about the varied skill levels, the differing personalities, and the varied interest of these individuals before going into this project. It's important to think about this. Every person coming to the project brings a certain type of expertise. They also come with a very unique personality and they have different interests that cause them to work in different ways. So it's important to try to think about these things. It's important to try to gain an understanding of who these individuals are and how are they going to work together? Let's take a look. Thinking about this team concept, I was recently assigned to manage a new project and I wanted to understand the history of my team members and I wanted to understand some of the things about them and understand how they were going to interact together. So I had to think about their skill levels, I had to understand their personalities, and unfortunately when I came into this project everybody on the team was pre-selected. So I had really no idea who I was working with. So I did some investigating. Through that investigation I discovered that all the team members on this team actually worked in different departments. Now initially when I found this out, I thought well this could be maybe not such a good thing. I really was hoping that the individuals on this team would be people who were working in the same department possibly and had a previous relationship. But through some initial discoveries I also found out that all of these individuals actually worked together on a previous project and they got along very well with each other. So this was a positive in my discovery in the process of starting to think about managing this team. They were also very effective at reaching their project goals and objectives. And that of course is a positive in this process because if we can be effective in managing our project and getting those goals achieved, that's a huge plus. They also had a good range of experience anywhere from two to 18 years with the company. That was a really good thing for me because if I've got people on the team who have less experience with the company I had a good range of experience where they could rely on the other people who had been more let's say a veteran to the organization and had worked on a lot more projects. So there was a good range of experience there, people that could work together and partner and that was a positive for me as well. Understanding all of these things I now knew that this group of individuals had all of the right components to be a successful and effective team. Let's talk about the team members. In my example, I said that my team members had been predetermined for me. Now team members can absolutely be personally selected. Sometimes the project manager is the one who's selecting the team members. There are other times when the person who actually asked for the project is selecting the members or it's a combination of an effort between those two individuals. When you think about these team members it's important to understand their work habits. It's also important to understand their interaction styles. How do you find this stuff out if you don't have a previous relationship with these individuals? Well, it can be very simple. It might sound like a lot of work to try to get to understand these people but actually you can just simply ask their managers or supervisors. Ask them how they work together. What are their work habits? How do they work with other people? You can also ask those individuals how well these groups that apparently have worked together on projects before have done in terms of working together on the team. You can also, in terms of understanding their interaction styles, you can self-survey the team members. And what I mean by that is you can actually ask them to take a survey. It can be anonymous and talk about how they like to interact with other people. How do they feel that they work on a team? What are their work habits? What are their styles? A lot of these surveys can certainly be pulled off of an online site. You can go and look for a survey and certainly just pull it together. Or you can create your own survey as well. Any way that's gonna help you to glean information from these individuals as well as from people who know these individuals is gonna help you better manage them and have a more successful project team. Let's talk about stakeholders. I mentioned that stakeholders were an important element that makes up the team. A stakeholder is either an individual or a group that has an interest in the team's assigned task or project and benefits from its positive outcome. There are two types of stakeholders. There's the primary or key stakeholder. We typically call this just a primary stakeholder. There's someone who has the most interest in the project and is most affected by the project's positive outcome. And then there's of course a secondary stakeholder. This is someone or possibly a group that has some level of interest in the project and is indirectly affected by some degree to some degree by some of the project's outcome. So you've got to figure out who the stakeholders are. This is important because these individuals or these groups have expectations. They have certain means in which they'd like you to evaluate quality. They have certain milestones they'd like you to achieve in the project. They have certain goals that they want you to achieve with the project. And they wanna make sure that the project's done on time. So it's important to understand who these individuals are before going into a project. Try to meet with these individuals as very important before the first meeting to get an understanding of what their expectations are. How involved do they wanna be in the project? How do they wanna be communicated with? It's very important to think about this because if they only wanna be made aware of things on a monthly basis, then that's what you need to do. They may wanna be involved in all of your weekly meetings. They may not wanna be involved in those meetings. And maybe they just want you to give them a summary via a memo or an email. So you've just got to understand how involved they wanna be and what their expectations are. Because that's gonna help you also to make sure that you mold your expectations, your goals, the means in which you measure quality around the stakeholders as well. Let's talk about a real life example. I was managing a project and we were responsible for implementing and launching a new product. This was a very high profile project. There were a number of stakeholders who had invested interest in the project. It was very important to understand who the primary and secondary stakeholders are. So I began to start to formulate my process and getting ready and preparing for that initial meeting to start the project and to launch this process. I was able to determine that Matt, one of my colleagues that I'd worked with on a previous project was actually the primary stakeholder because he had a direct interest in the outcome of the project. And the secondary stakeholders were made up of project designers, marketing, and sales consultants as they would be working closely with the project team but would not be directly involved in the outcome. The key here was that making sure that I identified all of the elements that make up a successful team and understanding who those stakeholders are is a key part of that process. So when we think about how to identify the elements of a team, we're gonna take a look at the guidelines. In this slide here, you see that there are several guidelines that you can follow to help you to make sure that you identify all the elements of your team. Some of these are understanding the concept of a team, identifying the purpose or the goal for the team. It's important to have a purpose or a goal. It helps the team to understand what are they striving for? What are they working towards? Obtaining relevant information about team members. That's very important. If you don't understand this before going into a project, it's gonna be very difficult to control how people work together and to also be able to anticipate any of those challenging situations. It's important not to prejudge your team members. You're going to get information sometimes from certain individuals who maybe don't have a very good perception of someone. But it's important to ask multiple individuals because lo and behold, if one person tells you that someone was terrible on a project and three other people tell you they were fantastic, chances are you know that it's likely that those two individuals just didn't get along together. So it's important to get a better picture. Again, identify the stakeholders, know who they are, know what their expectations are, and make sure that you communicate that to the team. Determine whether the goals of the primary and the secondary stakeholders are the same. Are they different? Do they have a conflict? It's important to iron all this stuff out before you even start managing this team and start the project. And then envision potential areas of conflict among team members. This is important because if you have dominant personalities on your team and then you have more submissive personalities, you've got to determine how those people are going to work together and who is best to partner on that team. You can control that. So before you even go into the process, you can say that Jane and Tom are going to work together because their personalities best match. Or Thomas and Betsy, they're going to work more effectively together. I'm going to put them on quality control. So just think about these things before you go into it and this is going to help you to make sure that you cover all these elements. And again, make sure that you start this project in a high note and as well as be successful. In this slide, you'll see that there's an assessment activity. I want you to take a moment to look at these questions and jot down some information. Think about your experiences as a team member. Did your team leader play an effective role in facilitating teamwork? What methods have managers used to determine your strengths and interests? In your experience, what has been the cheap source of conflict among team members? How has your team leader dealt with this conflict? In thinking about this type of information, asking yourself these questions and jotting down some information, you'll be able to rely on your experience of being involved in a team. Think about some of the things that actually worked, some of the things that were successful. Also, you'll be able to think about some of the things that didn't work so well. And then this will help you to determine how can you better manage your team in your future projects so that you don't make those mistakes in the future. So take a few moments, jot down some information, and when you're done with this session, refer back to this information and use it to help you with planning.