Starting Off on the Right Foot: Take Proactive Measures to Enhance Project Teams' Performance

Abstract

Key Findings • The period between a project’s initiation and the project team’s first meeting is a crucial time that can significantly affect the team’s success • Team leaders can use this time effectively to lay the groundwork for their team’s activities via a mobilization strategy, in which a leader researches the team’s objectives, proactively defines members’ roles, and staffs the team based on members’ knowledge, skills and abilities • The amount of a team’s aggregate knowledge, skills and abilities, or human capital, is less important to team effectiveness than is the proper alignment of this human capital with project tasks.