What’s Going On With My Team! (Part I)

Suddenly it is as if they don’t like each other

This is Part I of a 3 part story about a team that was initially working together well and then began to have problems that were impacting the team members and the outcome of their initiative. In Part I we’ll provide background information, Part II will discuss why the team was having the problems they were having and Part III will discuss the resolution to the problems to get the team back on track.

The story…

Jack is a project manager with 5 years of experience managing projects. All of his projects in the past have been simple 1 – 2 month efforts. This current project is more complex and will be a 6 – 8 month effort for the team. His team has been working together for the last 2 months quite effectively. It did take them a bit of time to get up to speed and begin to work as a real team and not just a group of individuals (1.5 months of time spent trying to get the team to work effectively together), but for the last 2 months all has been well and the project appears on track. The team consists of a co-located group of individuals with similar backgrounds and years of experience working in the company, although they had never worked together on an initiative.

Because they have been effective, Jack has been able to step out of a number of activities and leave it to the team to handle. This includes team meetings (Jack don’t attend every single one) and leaving problem solving to the team. They contact Jack when they need him to help with resolving a problem or speaking with a key stakeholder. The few meetings Jack dropped in on just to “check in” were going along quite well – the team was organized, had an agenda and were accomplishing what they needed to against the agenda.

Activities completed by team members have been of high quality and on time. They really seem to have been enjoying working together on this project.

However…over the past two weeks Jack has noticed the following:

• Lack of attention to detail – there have been a number of errors in task completion and reduced quality overall.
• The team is complaining about the project sponsor.
• Reduced attendance at team meetings and those who do attend do not appear to accomplish much (the last two team meetings Jack attended were vastly different than what Jack had seen at previous meetings.)
• There appears to be more conflicts among team members and, when they occur, are not resolved quickly and often require Jack to step in and resolve the conflict even what appears to be the most minor of disagreements.

Jack is wondering if he should have stayed more involved.

In Part II, we’ll look at why the team is having problems.