In this era of globalization, organizations have expanded in different parts of the world. Today, the large organizations have to manage the large teams. It is important that the organizations should have strong leader in place that can manage the large team. It has become absolutely important for organizations to have leaders in place that can motivate the team members. It is noted that the motivation of team members is the key driver for organization’s productivity. The objective of this paper is to discuss the ways to lead an effective project team. The specific topic of the paper is to discuss the ways leaders can manage the team in health care projects. The health care projects and hospital is considered as an organization for this paper as health care industry is a dynamic industry and it is important that different stakeholders should work together. The health care leaders must have an effective way to manage nurses so that adequate health services could be delivered. For this paper, the group of nurses in the health care institution can be considered as the project team and health care administrator as the leader that has to manage the team effectively. This paper is based on the project of electronic health record system implementation for a large-scale health care institution in Australia. A lot of research is already done in the broad area of health care technology and the specific areas like the use of EHR (Electronic Healthcare Record) system. It would be interesting to study the efficiency that electronic health record system can bring and the steps that project manager should take to make this project a success.
The field of nursing is a dynamic field and it is important that nurses must focus on continuous path of learning and development. The critical thinking is an important aspect of learning and development for nurses. In an organizational setting, the employees would have various levels of competence. Some of the employees would be at the novice level and some at the expert level. It is important that the employees at the expert level should continuously educate the employees at the novice level. It can be said that there is a strong connection between critical thinking, scholarship, and practice. The focus on practice and scholarship helps people to attain a good level of critical thinking. In fact, there can be a transformation in the problem-solving skill with the combination of critical thinking, scholarship, and practice. The continuous improvement in the decision-making skills and critical thinking comes from a combination of theoretical knowledge and practical exposures. Therefore, the objective of the project leader would be to get the experienced nurses in the organization. The vision of effective project leadership within the organization can be shown as:
To improve the performance of the team, the project leader should also focus on continuous quality improvement and efficient system. By efficient it means avoiding waste, including waste of equipment, supplies, ideas, and energy. There is a desperate need to make our healthcare systems more efficient. The efficiency can be improved with an increase use of health care technology. The strategy to focus on health care technology would certainly be beneficial for health care organizations in long term. However, the challenge is to manage the short-term cost. In addition, the human resource shortage is also a challenge. The project leader can manage this challenge with standardization (Geogiadou, McGuinness, Siakas, Kourourakis, Rahanu, & Khan, 2015). It is suggested that the project leader should focus on the things like job satisfaction and employee engagement. One of the main aspects of operationalized can be job satisfaction. However it is difficult to measure job satisfaction. The other aspects which can be operationalized is the average money in the job pursuing the career. One needs to determine a threshold value of annual salary above which is sufficient for individual to be happy. Average annual salary is one aspect of career growth. It can be operationalized using the salary aspect (Basu, 2014). Other aspect of the career growth can be on how many people report to you. In terms of career growth this aspect could be operationalized. The broad themes that should be used to manage the project team can be discussed as:
There are various themes of effective team learning and development. It is crcucial that the leaders and managers should focus on these themes of team development so that an integrated team is formed. At the same time, it is important that people should be willing to learn from the experiences of other people in the team. The specific themes of effective team management can be discussed as:
Project must deliver what is promised or identified as part of requirement. As per the PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge), customer satisfaction is achieved if the deliverables are confirming to the requirements and are fit for use. Quality control ensures that customer satisfaction is met (Turner, 2014). The project team should follow the organization’s quality policy for the project so as to ensure that project quality should be in alignment with organization’s policies and standards. Also, Manager must ensure that quality should be provided not only in deliverables but also in the project management. If the organization does not have any quality policy, team can identify its own quality policy. Also, If customer are following their own quality policy and organization is having its own policy, then separate policy needs to be designed that will the needs of both.
It is always more cost effective to prevent the errors as compared to rectifying the errors. The team management control mechanism should be built in the project and not just controlled by periodic inspection (Martinelli, & Milosevic, 2016). The preventive measures of team management would include regular communication with employees, focus on employee engagement, etc. (Heizer, 2016).
It is the responsibility of the management to provide the agreed levels of quality to the customer. Sometimes, there can be conflict on the definition of quality for various stakeholders and thus it is advisable to discuss and define the quality requirement upfront in the project (Kim & Kumar, 2014). The combination of team management tools would ensure that efficiency and effectiveness is not compromised. The control mechanism for any project would depend on the way project managers manages the team. It is suggested that the project manager should have a direct involvement in the control mechanism so that excellent quality could be provided. The project management has to ensure that the control mechanism is revised on regular basis. The continuous focus on quality management ensures that quality management is established as a process in the organization (Hua & Tian, 2014).
There is no dearth of cases where project are abandoned in between and contracts are broken due to the poor quality. This will put the credibility of the project management team as well as their organizations and impact their ability to get the business in future. Thus, Project team must focus on providing high quality to build their reputation and credibility with the client (Goetsch, & Davis, 2014). This will also increase the probability of future projects with the same customers. Thus, Quality control will also help in building the reputation of the organization.
The literature suggests that the Tuckman model of team management is an effective model that project managers must use. The five stages of this model can be discussed as:
This is the first stage of team development. This is the stage in which the team is formed. In this stage, some people would be anxious and some would be curious. In this stage the team leader or the project manager should set the expectations. As an outcome of this model, all the stakeholders or team members should have a common vision in mind.
This is the second stage of team development. Storming often starts where there is a conflict between team members’ natural working styles. People may work in different ways for all sorts of reasons but, if differing working styles cause unforeseen problems, they may become frustrated.
This is the third stage of team development. This is the stage where the individuals would start to overcome their differences. The major responsibility of team leader or project manager in this phase is to show the vision or the end state to team.
This is the fourth and the most important stage of team development. The team performance would be high only when the team members have an end state or a vision in mind. In this stage, all the team members should work hard so that the end state is achieved (Burke, 2013).
This is the last stage of team development. This is the stage in which the project manager would dissolve the team and all the members would start looking for new projects. It is important that adequate feedback should be given in this phase (Sasaki, & Hutchuns, 2014).
The above model can be represented as:
There are various tools of team management that could also be used to manage the project team. These tools can be shown as:
Each of these tools or approaches can be discussed as:
Based on the above discussions the steps that should be taken to manage the project team effectively can be discussed as:
Step 1: Apply Benchmark practices within the team
Benchmarking is the process in which project manager compare the team effectiveness with the other projects in the same industry or different industry. The objective of benchmarking is that current project can introspect and if there is significance difference in any of the project measure, then project manager should redefine their strategy to strive towards that goal. The benchmarking can be done for each of the employee or a group of employees.
Step 2: Improve the productivity level of team members
It is important that project leaders should have a continuous focus to improve the productivity level of employees (Khalil, Ismail & Karim, 2017). It is suggested that team leaders should focus on the combination of monetary and non-monetary rewards to incentivize the users. It is recommended that project leader should use a combination of monetary and non-monetary benefits. There are various other ways to improve the productivity level of employees. For example, project managers should use Maslow hierarchy model to motivate the employees.
Step 3: Identify, develop & establish the metrics for better team management
In this approach, various metrics are determined that will reflect the team effectiveness of the project and their values can be calculated from time to time to ensure team goals are meet. There can be metrics like number of hours required for completing the project, Number of issues find out during review meetings, conformance to the requirements, cost per unit, Project progress and many more depending the requirements of the project (Kenyon, & Sen, 2015). It is important that the project leader or the team manager must establish these metrics and these metrics should be shared with all the team members.
Step 4: Take feedback from team
It is recommended that team leader or project manager should take regular feedback from employees. The feedback from team members would enable the leader to develop the best strategy for team. In team management, the overall effectiveness should be evaluated to ensure that they are conforming to the organizational mission and vision. It is actually an executing process where all the plans and guidelines are implemented to meets the needs of requirements. It is an ongoing process and can be thought of as continuous improvement (Atkinson, 1999). It focuses on eliminating the everyday issues, problems and defects and improves the efficiency of the project (Kernzer, 2013). It is important that the feedback from employees should be taken in a positive manner.
It is important that team leader or project manager should focus to establish a culture where employees can work with high motivation level. For effective team management, the culture should be transparent. It is important that project leader should lead from the front. The communication channel should be two ways and leader should also motivate the employees to think out of the box.
Conclusion
The above paper discusses the ways to lead an effective project team. With the above discussion, it can be said that team management has become very important in the area of the project management these days. It is because this is the era of massive competition where everyone is looking for high efficiency. There are various challenges to manage the project teams. It would be correct to summarize that the cultural challenges could be the biggest issue. The issue of culture is more noticeable and more important when the project manager has to manage a multicultural team. With the above discussion, it can be said that team management is an integral part of organization. The team management for any organization or project management would depend on the combination of internal and external factors. It is critical for organizations and management to manage the internal and external parameters so that the team dynamics in maintained (Xu, 2011). With the above discussion, it can be said that organizations should not only focus on any single tool of team management but multiple tools of team management. The learning from the above paper can be applied to the team management within the health care setting. The learning would also help the leaders and project managers across various industries. It is important that the project manager should also take inputs form team members before developing or implementing any strategies for team development. The paper also discusses the team formation models of Tuckman where he has explained that there are five stages of team development. It is recommended that team leaders and managers must focus on all the stages of team development.
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