LESSON 11

LESSON

CREATING A
HIGH-PERFORMING
TEAM
• Build a Team
• Define Team Ground Rules
• Negotiate Project Agreements
• Empower Team Members and Stakeholders
• Train Team Members and Stakeholders
• Engage and Support Virtual Teams
• Build a Shared Understanding about
a Project

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Build a Team
TOPIC A

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CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMING TEAM > BUILD A TEAM

Deliverables and Tools

Skills list RACI matrix

Technology Pre-assignment tools
Resource Management Plan Virtual teams
Rates
Resource assignment

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Project Team

DEFINITION
A set of individuals who support the project
manager in performing the work of the project to
achieve its objectives.

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Stakeholder

DEFINITION
An individual, group, or organization that may
affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be
affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a
project, programs, or portfolio.

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 Project Stakeholders

Customers

Sponsors Suppliers

Managers Organization End users

Employees Community

Government 6

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Stakeholder Identification

Identify the Create the

People Register
✓ Usually done during project ✓ The stakeholder register
charter development; may be affected by
continues as needed. organizational environment
factors.
✓ Analyze and document
stakeholder interest, ✓ Project plans should
involvement, describe stakeholders and
interdependencies, the planned engagement
influence, and potential model.
impact on project success.
✓ Refer to stakeholder
✓ Look for additional registers from previous
stakeholders in change logs, projects.
issue logs, or requirement
documents as work
progresses. 7
Stakeholder Register

DEFINITION A list of individuals or organizations who are

actively involved in the project, whose interests
may be negatively or positively affected by the
performance or completion of the project and
whose needs or expectations need to be
considered.

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Stakeholder Register

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RACI Chart

DEFINITION
A common type of responsibility assignment
matrix (RAM)
Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and
Informed statuses define the involvement of
stakeholders in project activities.

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RACI Chart - Example

Quality
Project Engineering Purchasing Manufacturing
Assurance
Manager Manager Manager Manager
Manager
Create blueprints
A R C C
Manufacture
circuit board I A C R
Test circuit board
I R A C
Order components
C C I R A
Assemble
I C C R

R = Responsible A = Accountable C = Consulted I = Informed

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Team Skills Appraisal
Appraisals enable the team to holistically
identify its strengths and weaknesses,
assess opportunities for improvement,
build trust, and establish effective
communication.
Appraisals might identify:
✓ Team preferences

✓ Aspirations

✓ Information processing and

organization
✓ Decision making processes

✓ Interactions with other team members

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Pre-Assignment Tools
Assess candidates before assigning and confirming team roles.

Attitudinal Specific Structured

surveys assessments interviews

Ability tests Focus groups

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Diversity, Equity and
Inclusion
Project teams are global and diverse
in culture, gender, physical ability,
language, etc.
Create an environment that optimizes
the team’s diversity and builds
climate of mutual trust.
Team development objectives should:
✓ Improve trust to raise team
morale, reduce conflict, and
support teamwork.
✓ Create a collaborative culture to
improve individual and team
performance and facilitate cross-
training and mentoring.
✓ Empower the team to participate
in decision making and own the
solutions they create.

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 Resource Management Plan

Roles and
Responsibilities What’s in the Plan
✓ Role – A person’s function in a project ✓ Project Organization Chart –
visualization of team and reporting
✓ Authority - Rights to use resources, make relationships
decisions, accept deliverables.
✓ Project team resource management -
Team resource guidance – How to
✓ Responsibility - Assigned duties
define, staff, manage, and release.
✓ Competence - Skills and capacities ✓ Training strategies and requirements
required ✓ Team development methods
✓ Resource controls – To manage
physical resources
✓ Recognition Plan - To reward/recognize
team members

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Virtual Teams

✓ Team members share

goals but spend little or no
time meeting face-to-face.

✓ Addressing their needs

takes some different skills.

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Virtual Team Considerations

Avoids
Lowers
Can find Relocation
workplace
ideal skill
costs expenses
sets

Bonding and
Enabling
Managing team dynamic
effective team
communications may be difficult
performance
to develop

Trial Focus on calendar

management,
communications Kanban boards and
technology for other information
discussion radiators
Assign Project
Responsibilities
Tailor according to team, needs,
project.
Consider technical and “soft” factors:
• Experience, knowledge, skills

• Attitude, global/regional
representation

Agile - Self-organizing teams assess

work requirements and determine
who will do the work.

Traditional – You assign work to

team members with a work
breakdown structure (WBS).

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Define Team Ground Rules
TOPIC B

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CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMING TEAM > DEFINE TEAM GROUND RULES

Deliverables and Tools

Team charter Negotiation skills

Team norms Conflict management
Brainstorming
Ethics

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Team Norms
Establish expected team behaviors at
the beginning of the project.

Enable teams to handle challenges as

the project progresses.
Include guidelines and techniques for:
✓ Meetings
✓ Communications
✓ Conflict management
✓ Shared values
✓ Decision-making

Align with PMI’s Code of Ethics and

Professional Conduct

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 Responsibility

PMI
Code of Respect

Ethics
and
Professional Fairness

Conduct
Honesty

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Team Charter

DEFINITION
A document that enables the team to establish
its values, agreements, and practices as it
performs its work together.

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Team Charter
Includes:
✓ Shared values
✓ Guidelines for communications
and use of tools
✓ Decision-making guidelines
✓ Conflict resolution measures
✓ Meeting time, frequency, and
channel
✓ Other team agreements e.g.
shared hours, improvement
activities

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Ground Rules

DEFINITION
As defined in the team charter, clear
expectations set, regarding the code of conduct
for team members.

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Ground Rules
Includes what’s acceptable and
unacceptable for team behavior

Benefits:
✓ Sets performance and
communication expectations
✓ Decreases risk of confusion

✓ Improves team performance

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Negotiate Project Agreements
TOPIC C

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CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMING TEAM > NEGOTIATE PROJECT AGREEMENTS

Deliverables and Tools

Service Level Agreement Negotiation skills

Performance report Expert judgment
Resource calendars Lessons learned
Go-Live Blackouts

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Project Agreement
Objectives
Reporting and verification criteria for
objectives are an important part of the
project agreement.

Traditional – Identify each deliverable

and objective acceptance criteria for
each.

Agile – Deliverables will vary as the

product backlog is added to, reprioritized,
and so forth.
Each story needs to have clearly defined
acceptance criteria approved by the
customer.
The project may also specify a Definition
of Done for the project, releases,
iterations, and user stories.

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Agreements

Agreements define initial intentions

for a project. These can be:

✓ Contracts - used for external

customers
✓ Memorandums of understanding
(MOUs)
✓ Service level agreements (SLA)
✓ Letters of agreement or intent
✓ Verbal agreements
✓ Email

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Negotiation Strategy
Procurement manager drives
negotiations for the exact parameters of
a contract.

Project manager and project teams

engage in negotiations.

Agile - Exact deliverables will vary as the

customer modifies, adds, and
reprioritizes items in the product backlog.
Therefore, define clearly delineated ways
to ensure agreed performance levels.

Traditional – An important objective

clearly designates the project’s intended
deliverables and how they will be
measured and compensated.

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Negotiations
Documents used either in reaching an
agreement or produced as the result of an
agreement:

✓ A statement of work or major deliverables

✓ A schedule with milestones and dates
✓ Performance reporting expectations
✓ Pricing and payment terms
✓ Inspection, quality requirements, and
acceptance criteria
✓ Warranty and future support
✓ Incentives or penalties
✓ Insurance and performance bonds
✓ Subcontractor approvals
✓ Terms and conditions
✓ Change request handling
✓ Termination clauses and dispute resolution

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Prioritization Techniques to
Determine Objectives
Use appropriate methods to learn the
order of work that needs to be done.

These can include:

✓ Review product backlog
✓ Kano Model
MoSCoW
must have
✓ MoSCoW (MSCW) Analysis
✓ Paired Comparison Analysis
✓ 100 Points Method should have
could have
won’t have

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Experts
Experts who can provide judgment
include:
✓ People from other areas of the
organization
✓ Consultants
✓ Stakeholders
✓ Professional and technical
associations

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Resource Calendars

Determine available resources (people,

equipment, material, etc.) during a
planned activity period.

Use when estimating project activities.

Identify key resource attributes (skills

and experience levels) to ensure that
appropriate and required resources will
be available for different aspects of the
project.

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Lessons Learned Register

DEFINITION
A project document used to record knowledge
gained during a project so that it can be used in
the current project and entered in the lessons
learned repository.

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Lessons Learned

Identify specific improvements that will

improve the team's overall efficiency
and effectiveness.

Agile teams hold a retrospective at the

end of each iteration to identify
potential issues, identify potential
solutions, and improve the processes
the team uses to improve its overall
performance.

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Empower Team Members and
Stakeholders
TOPIC D

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CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMING TEAM > EMPOWER TEAM MEMBERS AND
STAKEHOLDERS
Deliverables and Tools

Decisions Team decision-making tools

Estimates Brainstorming
Fist of Five
Roman voting
Polling
Planning poker
Dot voting
Retrospective

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Team Strengths

When forming teams, it’s critical to

understand the skills and
competencies needed to perform
project work and produce deliverables.
j

Identify team strengths and

weaknesses to organize around team
strengths.

As teams progress, leverage team

members’ skills to improve team
performance.

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Brainstorming

An ideation technique for teams.

A facilitator works with the team to
identify potential solutions to a given
problem.
Team performs various types of
analysis to select the most appropriate
alternatives.

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Estimates
People doing the work should be estimating tasks
because they know:
✓ the risks
✓ the level of effort
✓ the potential pitfalls

Traditional - Use hours of effort.

✓ Three-point estimating asks the estimators to
provide the most likely (tM); optimistic (tO);
and pessimistic (tP) estimates then divide by
three:
tE = (tO + tM + tP) / 3
✓ Other methods include analogous, parametric,
bottom-up estimating

Agile - Avoid using absolute time estimates.

Story Point technique uses points, not time
units, to estimate the difficulty of implementing
a user story. It’s an abstract measure of effort
required to implement work.

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Team Task
Accountability

Encourage team members to self-

organize in determining:
✓ What work needs to be done
Gantt Chart
✓ How to perform the work

✓ Who should perform it

Use Gantt charts and Kanban boards to

promote visibility and collaboration.

Agile - Team commits to performing

work in an iteration.

Kanban Board
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Retrospective
✓ A regular check on the
effectiveness of quality processes

✓ Look for the root cause of issues

then suggest trials of new
approaches to improve quality.

✓ Evaluate any trial processes to

determine if they are working and
should be continued, need
adjusting or discontinued.

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Train Team Members and
Stakeholders
TOPIC E

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CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMING TEAM > TRAIN TEAM MEMBERS AND
STAKEHOLDERS

Deliverables and Tools

Training and mentoring plan Training gap analysis

Training cost estimates Training
Training calendar Pairing and mentoring
Training assessment
Certifications

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Training and Coaching
Training focuses on building individual
skills for use in the present.

Coaching helps develop well-rounded

individuals through long-term
professional relationships between
novice and experienced employees.

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Training Options

Options Description

• Live, online, instructor-led training through a virtual

Virtual Instructor-led
meeting or virtual training environment.
training
• Simulated hands-on labs are possible.

• Content available to students online. This can include

Self-paced eLearning rich-media video, simulated lab exercises, etc.
• This solution is scalable to a large number of students.

• For simple knowledge transfer, sharing relevant

Document reviews
documents may be sufficient.

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Certifications

Demonstrate that knowledge and skills

have been gained during training.

Industry credentials are portable and

valuable to individuals and future
employers. CAPM

PMI-ACP

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Engage and Support Virtual Teams
TOPIC F

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CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMING TEAM > ENGAGE AND SUPPORT VIRTUAL TEAMS

Deliverables and Tools

Collaboration technology Communication

Engagement assessments Communication plan
Project or Resource Calendar Variance analysis
PM Powers

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Collaboration
Technology
Enables teams to plan, collaborate, and
communicate.

Not a substitute for team planning

activities.

Consider transparency requirements when

selecting collaboration technology.

Collaboration tools might include:

✓ Shared task boards - To promote
visibility
✓ Messaging and chat boards - To
enable communication
✓ Knowledge repositories - To store
shared documents
✓ Video-conferencing tools - For face-to-
face communication

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Build a Shared Understanding
About a Project
TOPIC G

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CREATING A HIGH-PERFORMING TEAM > BUILD A SHARED UNDERSTANDING
ABOUT A PROJECT

Deliverables and Tools

Vision Charter
XP Metaphor Project Plan
Product box exercise Kick-off meeting
Brainstorming
T-Shaped Skills

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Project Vision
At the start of a project, you need a clear
vision of the desired objectives. You also
need to understand and appreciate how
the project vision aligns with the
organization’s strategic goals.
You are the steward of this vision, and it’s
up to you as the project manager to ensure
the project delivers.
A vision statement might include:
✓ Product or solution description
✓ Intended users or consumers of the
solution
✓ Key desired objectives
✓ Differentiators from competitive
approaches
✓ Key features and benefits

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Project Charter

DEFINITION
A document issued by the project initiator or
sponsor that formally authorizes the existence of
a project and provides the project manager with
the authority to apply organizational resources to
project activities.

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Project Charter Contents
✓ Assigned project manager and
responsibility / authority level

✓ Name and authority of project sponsor

✓ Other optional content:

– Measurable project objectives and
related success criteria
– High-level requirements
– High-level project description,
boundaries, and key deliverables
– Overall project risk
– Summary of milestone schedules
– Pre-approved financial resources
– Key stakeholders register
– Project approval requirements
– Project exit criteria

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Project Overview
Statement

Communicates enterprise-wide the

intent and vision of the project.

Written with brevity and clarity.

Captures the project’s objective, problem

or opportunity, and criteria for success.

Authorization via the project charter or

approved project overview statement
enables kickoff activities of project
planning.

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Kickoff Meeting
Meeting goals:
✓ Establish project context

✓ Assist in team formation

✓ Ensure team alignment to the overall project

vision

Activities during kickoff may include:

✓ Defining a vision statement

✓ Defining a team charter

✓ Assisting the customer/Product Owner with:

- User story writing

- Estimation of effort
- Prioritization planning
- Initial product backlog

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Overview - Agile Ceremonies
A sprint is a
In a sprint planning timeboxed iteration
meeting, the team in Scrum.
collaborates to plan work
for the current sprint.

Scrum is an agile
framework for developing
and sustaining complex
products, with specific
roles, events, and
artifacts.

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More Agile Ceremonies
In a Sprint Review at the end of each
iteration, the Product Owner and other
Hold daily customer stakeholders review progress
standups—short and receive feedback for that iteration.
(10-15 minute)
daily meetings—
for the team to
reaffirm A Scrum Master
commitment to facilitates a Sprint
objectives for the Retrospective for the
iteration, identify team to identify
potential improvements. They
blockers, and review the team’s
coordinate the processes and
day’s work. practices and identify
ways to improve
performance and
collaboration.
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Task Boards
✓ Visualize work and enable the team
and stakeholders to track progress as
work is performed.

✓ Promote visibility and maximize

efficiency and accountability.

✓ Examples: Kanban boards, to-do lists,

procedure checklists, and Scrum
boards.

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Reach Consensus

Method Best for How It Works

Fist of Five Expression of range of Closed fist = complete disagreement
agreement Fist of 5 – complete agreement

Roman Simple yes or no Thumbs up or down (sometimes

Voting sideways for neutral)

Polling Consider independent points of Hear opinions and then vote

view

Dot Voting Select several options from a list Distribute dots equally, then each
person allocates dots according to
highest preference

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Estimation Techniques
Use common t-
Planning poker estimates effort shirt sizes to
or relative size of development assign values
effort. Use a deck of cards with to user stories.
modified Fibonacci numbers to
vote on user stories. Also called
Scrum poker.

Story Pointing
Use a relative measure
e.g. numbers in the Fibonacci
sequence—for the level of
difficulty or complexity of a
feature. Individuals assign story
points.

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 End of
Module 1

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