Resources
Building The Team
If you need to bring together people from different backgrounds and experience in order to take important decisions for the organisation, you need to allow some time for them to develop as a group. In small projects, very basic training or a detailed briefing may be all that is required. In more major undertakings, time invested in developing your team will help ensure you make the right decisions.
It is important to get the right mix of people involved in a team. Most of the projects we refer to involve changing technology or processes. In situations such as this you need a combination of the people who:
know why we carry out the process
know 'how we do it now' inside out and
can inject new ideas
If the process is related to the use of technology you also need people who fully understand the technological capabilities as this can be important in helping to impose a sanity check on blue-sky thinking.
Usually within any educational establishment you have a limited choice of people available to carry out projects and often it is the same small pool of individuals that are called upon to fill the posts of all project teams. The Process Review infoKit mentions Belbin Team Roles - the ideal mix of roles for a team. Where team members don't conveniently fall into each of the roles, then allocating them to individuals can have the same effect.
