Project management team

One of the most important steps within a project is to carefully select and build a team which will manage project activities. Project management team building is not an easy job to do because it requires a lot of objectivity and competences. Before choosing a team for your project and starting project management team development, you obviously need to think about what kinds of specialists are required for your project, what responsibilities and roles are needed, and who will be in charge of a team leader. This article will help you go through the process of project management team selection and show you necessary information about project management teams. 

A project management team is a group of people involved in administering project activities (such as managing risks, controlling changes, budgeting, planning efforts etc.) and monitoring project threats. It is a distinct and separate unit which performs team-specific tasks in an incremental, iterative and parallel manner. Common project management team responsibilities are listed below:

• Planning collaborative efforts of project staff
• Scheduling activities
• Budgeting and cost management
• Communications management
• Establishing and managing relationships with external organizations and suppliers
• Monitoring and managing project risks

 Typically, project management team is broken down into a two-level structure which is usually headed up by a project management team leader, or a project manager. A project management team leader is a person who plans, controls and manages activities of the team and takes an ultimate responsibility for the overall results produced by this team. This person is also responsible for developing project management team building strategies, increasing project management team motivation and morale, and arranging skill development trainings.

A typical team for managing projects and related activities consists of several persons who play the following project management team roles:

• Project Manager (or project management and team management leader), who leads and controls the team
• Risk Analyst, who takes care for identifying risks and developing risk response strategies
• Procurement Manager, who establishes and controls adherence to project management team rules of managing purchasing activities
• Quality Engineer, who assures and controls quality of project products/services
• Scheduler, who plans working time and develops project schedules
• Technical Leader, who develops technical specifications and treats for realizing technical aspects of project management team objectives

All the roles are usually outlined in a project management team charter, a formal document. It shows a hierarchy of the roles and their relationships. Such a chart is typically created and approved during project management team meetings.

 In order to build effective project management team communication and collaboration, task management software is required. Such software allows using various teambuilding techniques and project management methods that help organize group tasks, team-based activities and teamwork. VIP Task Manager is an example of task management software.

VIP Task Manager features Resource List view that allows adding new user accounts to your database. For each project management team member, there can be created a user account protected by password and permissions. When a user tries to log in your database, he/she needs to type in a personal password. You can set permissions for each user so only permitted project management team names will be allowed to review and edit information in the database.

 Resource List view has Roles Panel that helps you define your project management team structure by creating and assigning specific roles to members of your team. Resource List view simplifies identification and organization of project management team building activities because you can assign several different roles to a user.