The project as a form of organization of activity provides for such a phenomenon as teamwork. Each participant of the project solves individual tasks set by the project manager, but there are tasks that can be solved exclusively in collective interaction. Even the elementary decomposition of a key project task is fully carried out in collective creativity. The formation of the project team is an important part of the pre–launch preparation and an essential block of work during the project implementation period.
The formation and development of a team is a process that has a certain duration. A team, no matter how strong personalities and specialists it is assembled from, cannot become highly effective overnight and immediately give excellent results. The project manager should lead his people along the path of becoming a community of like-minded people with patience and consistency. In an effectively built team, the goals and objectives of the project unite people in the team, and individual and team results acquire recognized quality and unambiguity (O’Neill & Salas, 2018). The project manager has the traits of not only a formal, but also an informal leader; respect and a positive attitude prevail in the team, conflicts are constructive and are quickly settled.
The project team performs two main functions. Firstly, its actions are aimed at solving the project’s task: searching for information, developing solutions, participating in final discussions, etc. Secondly, the team acts in support of the project manager and colleagues. The effectiveness of the team should be defined as the ratio of the result of the solved task and the totality of efforts aimed at creating a team and leadership (Lai et al., 2018). The economic feasibility of team methods of work does not always allow them to be applied. However, the features of the project task are very favorable for the success of team activity.
The leader must do everything correctly and invest energy in building team spirit at the right times. In this case, the synergy will not take long, and the best features of the team will manifest. The formation of the project team is described by a separate process responsible for the selection and recruitment of its members. The main result of the process is the description and management of the selection of team members with the consolidation of areas of responsibility for the creation of a productive team. Next, a visual model of the project team recruitment process is presented (Mudassar et al., 2020). The selection of a team, and the recruitment of its members for successful functioning, requires taking into account several circumstances. The first thing to consider is the possible opposition of functional managers to the selection of their employees to participate in the team: it does not matter, partially or in full. The project manager should be ready to conduct effective negotiations with company officials and be able to influence them.
The inputs to the team recruitment process are the human resource management plan, the company’s environmental factors and the assets of the organization’s processes. In the interpretation of the leader, the selection of team members and their recruitment is carried out in several stages. In agreement with some employees of the company and external persons, their preliminary appointment is made, which facilitates the start of recruitment work. Then comes the negotiation process with the heads of functional units, managers of other projects or potential external performers. The team is recruited either exclusively by the leader themselves, or with the involvement of the personnel service, as well as external recruiting agencies, based on the results of the plan and internal corporate opportunities (Lai et al., 2018). The team is selected based on the results of the analysis of recruitment decisions based on a variety of criteria, such as availability, costs, experience, abilities, knowledge, skills, attitude and international factors.
For the project manager, harmonious relations with functional managers are of great importance in strategic terms. The selection of team members is a very delicate issue, despite all the rigidity of deadlines and quality requirements for its solution. Considering the above, it is difficult not to express a personal position from practical experience. It seems that there is an ethically verified solution which lies in the task paradigm of managerial interaction (Lai et al., 2018). The emergence of volunteers significantly softens the power and administrative tensions during recruitment. The formation and development of a team is a process that has a certain duration. A team, no matter how strong personalities and specialists it is assembled from, cannot become highly effective overnight and immediately give excellent results. The project manager should lead his people with patience and consistency along the path of becoming a community of like-minded people.
In the presented research, not only the methodological foundations of the formation of a project team and the recruitment of its participants were analyzed. The main features and peculiarities of the project team, as opposed to working groups, were revealed. The main value of the material is the emphasis on the belief that every project manager has the opportunity to go beyond resource constraints and find those candidates who will make success out of individual progress.
References
Lai, C. Y., Hsu, J. S., & Li, Y. (2018). Leadership, regulatory focus and information systems development project team performance. International Journal of Project Management, 36(3), 566-582.
Mudassar, A., Zhang, L., Salim, K., Syed, J. S., & Rizwan, U. (2020). Linking humble leadership and project success: The moderating role of top management support with mediation of team-building. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 32(8), 1-18.
O’Neill, T. A., & Salas, E. (2018). Creating high performance teamwork in organizations. Human Resource Management Review, 24(8), 199-206.