Have you gotten together in a team and divided work unsuccessfully?  Perhaps you worked in a student team creating business plans, and two classmates thought they were in charge of researching financials, leaving market research a huge hole in your presentation.  Maybe you were running a charity event, and your co-worker forgot to grab the venue before the deadline, bloating your budget by $1,000.  Or you and your friends decided to run a D&D campaign, but no one prepped their characters, so you spent 3 hours rolling characters instead of exploring new worlds.

No matter if you have a formal or informal team, whether it’s for work or pleasure, projects require work.  That work, in turn, must be completed by various people, all coordinated together to finish the project successfully.  We all have the best intentions, but no matter how great we are at personal task management, things fall through the cracks.  That’s because when you look only at what you are doing, you often overlook how someone else could be affecting you.

The role of project managers in traditional businesses is to make sure the team does not overlook important tasks.  Unfortunately, it’s hard to justify a “project manager” role for all types of teams.  Students tend to think in terms of their individual grades.  Co-workers may have other priorities, bigger than your charity event.  And friends might just forget to prep since they have spouses, parents, and children to worry about.

That’s why some teams have to manage themselves, without the role of the all-knowing project manager.  Each individual needs to know what they’re working on AND what others are doing so everyone’s tasks can be adjusted accordingly.  The two students working on financials should be able to identify that they are doing duplicate work, the marketing lead should see that no one is booking a venue for the charity event, and the Dungeon Master should be able to remind people that everyone needs to create a character before the game begins.

I am very passionate about self-managed teams.  They’re not applicable in all situations, but if you can pull it off, the project (and more important, the people working on a project) prospers and future work becomes easier. I plan to write more about self-managed teams during the next few weeks in the blog.  If you have any suggested topics for a blog or have any criticisms about the value of self-managed teams, feel free to drop me a line – deborah AT fellowstream DOT com.

-Deborah Fike

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