How do you build a successful project team? Tips from Microsoft

Leadership, teaming, technology adoption and measuring effectiveness are the four things that Mike Hughes, Office Business Group Lead for Microsoft Ireland believes are essential for building a successful project team.

He spoke at an Ireland Chapter of PMI event recently about collaboration best practice and how to create effective project teams in the current business climate. Here’s what he had to say.

1. Leadership

Mike had four soundbites for successful leadership on project teams:

• Lead by example
• Strategy before technology
• Learn to get out of the way
• Create a supportive environment

2. Teaming

Mike said project managers should listen to employees and ensure that the right people are involved. He told us to weigh up the benefits to the individual with company benefits to aim to get a good balance.

3. Technology adoption

Mike explained how Microsoft is currently thinking about collaboration: it’s all about integrating it into the flow of work instead of something that bolts on afterwards. Full integration of collaboration and ‘social’ technologies allows project teams to adapt and evolve their work and processes.

4. Measuring effectiveness

Mike said that it was important to measure what matters with persistence. If you are trying to use a tool like Yammer (which is now owned by Microsoft) without KPI’s then you’ll fail, he said.

The death of the job description

Mike said that nobody does what’s on their job description any more (at least in the project management or technology worlds) because the reality is that non-routine work involves people needing to be able to think. Collaboration tools require leadership and that means trusting the team to do the right thing.

“Social is changing the way we work,” he said. One of the major problems for teams is staying on top of email and social tools give you an opportunity to change that. He said that 85% of Fortune 500 companies use social networks, mainly Yammer (perhaps this is because it is given away free with Office 365 licences).

Delve: Microsoft’s new search

Having so much information available through a rich network means that search is even more important. Mike also talked about a new search tool called Delve. This learns about your role and work and presents you with what he called “opportunities”. Personally I think it sounds quite scary: it is effectively predictive search based on what you normally look at and people you normally talk to. He gave the example of wanting to find a presentation that was given at a meeting: instead of contacting the meeting organiser you can simply search the organisational memory for the presentation and assuming it has been made public you can access it. It might then also show you other presentations you might find interesting and people you might like to talk to. You could spend hours having a nose through other people’s files and looking at people’s profiles.

All of Microsoft’s products are moving towards integration and allowing people to interact. Yammer is integrated into SharePoint 2013, portal tools enable sharing and search like never before.

This is the way that social is changing the way we work, and the way our colleagues expect us to work. Successful project teams are successful because they move with the times and evolve their working practices to ensure that success follows.