3 things that greatly impact how well your team performs include:

1. Belonging

2. Significance

3. Boundaries

Then have a formal plan (include within the project plan and manage it like a deliverable) to help integrate those three things to form the basis of your Project Culture. Finally, overlay that culture to continuously be Goal Oriented.

1. Belonging 

Can be described as knowing where they fit within the team and also organization.  Both are critical and will overlap, so one easy way to understand if there is an issue is to ask the question out-right…. “how are you feeling in terms of comfort and security with your overall position within the project and the company”.  If this is not positive, you also need to have a strategy to address it as best you can (since likely you will not have the time or the resources available – so be creative and let them know you will do your best)

Other aspects of belonging include understanding how each team member is connected to others, every person wants to fit in and have positive interactions and attention and this leads to trust, which leads to strong communication/interaction and thus productivity & performance.

2. Significance 

Can be described as the ability to have each stakeholder understand how their capabilities are aligned with the project demands.  How can the project leadership team enable all team members to make a difference in the project through meaningful contributions – providing a sense of personal power.  All humans are hard-wired with a need for personal power and growth of their internal confidence that leads to independence and essentially self-acutalization.  No person wants to be micro-managed and far too often a manager falls into the trap of:

- Tell a person what to do

- Tell then show a person how to do it

- Monitor the person while they are doing it and constantly get involved

- Approve/Reject/Criticize then take over near the end

3. Boundaries 

Every project has a plan. Although we want each team member to have self-independence and empowerment, they must be working together and following the same path.  We must allow small mistakes to occur and learn from and things will never be perfect and must have paths and culture for optimization. Too often companies establish high levels rules, policies and excessive administration – which turns employees into robots. Creativity and innovation are depleted, self pride and accountability become minimized and true value from the employee is lost. It is a fine balance as to when do you micro-manage and when do you provide freedom to achieve work that you can see was your own and take ownership, pride and self-learnings from. 

Tools to enable the 3 parameters include:

Belonging – org chart (diagrams for multiple levels), roles and responsibilities (customized for each project), RAM (Responsibility and Assignment Matrix), Communication Plan (swim lanes as to who to go to for what and when), team building events

Significance –  Transparency on Role Accountability and the assigned person’s Capability (this is key and can leverage concepts fro Requisite Organizational Design or Elliott Jaques methodologies), check point reviews (what has been completed – celebrate milestones), recognition culture (do not need to have tangible awards/gifts we all have a job to do and positive recognition culture can be instilled into a team without a physical cost to the project), alignment of project achievements with personal learning or growth plans

Boundaries – Sponsor’s Vision charter, guidelines, codes of conduct, plans, objectives, Constraints (money, time, scope, quality, HR), plans, scope statements, requisite organizational design models, work capability models, trust, measurement and monitoring systems, stop or red/yellow/green or go/no-go systems, informal reporting systems (simple/fast social media style updates), trust

Goal Oriented

All of this then must be combined under a project culture that is Goal Oriented, tools that can help with that include:  org design clarity (charts/structure), communication and accountability swim lanes, milestone visuals, bar charts (gannt charts), graphs, spreadsheets, KPIs, CSFs, objectives, deliverables (ideally you can have both tangible, concrete goals but do not forget to include the intangible, subjective goals) and also the excerpts from specific documents such as:  Concept, Proposal, Charter, Scope Statement, Project Plan, etc.

A system rapidly gaining popularity in projects and business is from Elliott Jaques.  A Canadian psychoanalyst and organizational psychologist, known for developing the notion of Requisite Organization from his 'Stratified Systems Theory'. (Wikipedia, see Elliott Jaques).

The more I study this, the more I realize how complex people and system interactions are within both business and project environments (you cannot have one without the other - so must link both with common platforms).  

Elliott is a supporter of innate, natural based hierarchies, where people can naturally be placed (within a structured strata or set of levels) and then excel as a collaborative group/entity. Align the role with the level of the person to prevent stress and maximize performance and happy quotient.

An article written by Elliott can be found at Harvard business review, called In Praise of Hierarchy .  In this article, he states.... to understand hierarchy, first you must understand employment. 

He continues to help remind us and clarify organizational structure with statements such as.....  To be employed is to have an ongoing contract that holds you accountable for doing work of a given type for a specified number of hours per week in exchange for payment. Your specific tasks within that given work are assigned to you by a person called your manager (or boss or supervisor), who ought to be held accountable for the work you do.

These basic concepts and definitions can be simple, yet they can be sensitive and may lead to people having different understandings.  Another reason as to why so many businesses and projects fail. Much stress is due to mis-understanding of roles, accountability and management interaction".

Can an organizational theory help us manage failure and risk (and Stress!!!)?

The requisite organization theory in its entirety is a great tool that can be leveraged.  It can be quite complex, but two core insights can be considered, as taken from the article:

 www.strategy-business.com/article/10938?gko=f119b

Insight 1
The first, is about potential capability and has to do with an innate quality of human nature: the amount of complexity that we can handle when we make a decision. This is complex to assess and often takes 100s of interviews and training to accurately assess, but is something objective and scientific when compared to most HR methods and practices. One of the simple indicators is the length of time span that the person works on (how long does the job or task take to be completed, is the person working on 1 day,  1 week, 3 month, 1 year, 7 year, 15 year jobs).  So thus people can be placed into strata, e.g. levels 1 to 7, based on the type of work they do.

Insight 2
The second is about managerial accountability. Every boss is accountable not just for overseeing subordinates, but for their results. It means that if people who report to you "screw up," you can't blame them. You either have to give them the support and coaching they need, or have the authority to rotate them to other posts, because you will be held responsible. A couple interesting aspects of this, is that a manager can refuse an employee that reports to them (have them moved to another job/position), and also the employee should have a Formalized Review Process (development & future growth) which should be managed by the manager once removed (two levels up) and not by the direct manager.

Granted, this type of system should have one key thing..... Trust with Positive Intent. In the end, establish that as much as you can, then remember to create a formal plan (roll out plan) as to how you will integrate systems such as Elliott's (as per above). Understanding and balance of Systems and Psychology will always create new opportunities for learnings and less stress and thus keep project management exciting!!!
  

Project & Business Management have many technical aspects that can easily follow logic. This can also thus be easily learned (business school, conferences, books, memorization).

This leads to many people that understand detailed project methodologies and systems, but don't really know how to link it to Business Success.

They lack understanding in the difference of getting the job done - so you can check off your requirements box  VS  delivering high performance value that leads to making a business impact.

Many businesses identify and assign project/business goals (quarterly/annually), then go into a zombie type of work mode that focuses on "working hard, putting in time, checking the boxes and then getting a bonus once it gets done" attitude. This gets work done and can be perceived as success, but then so much "is left on the table".

The opportunity is that typical businesses lack clarity on definitions of business value and performance and focus too much on requirements. I also think this can in part be attributed to the fact that projects and business involve people and people sometimes do not follow logic.

Solutions evolve and risk events occur continuously (small, large and are cumulative). People are the greatest influence on risk management and they themselves can be very unpredictable month over month based on many, many variables including:

• things at home, 
• personal conflicts, 
• lack of trust, 
• past history, 
• variance in knowledge/skills/experience, 
• culture, 
• expectations, 
• vested interest, 
• personal strengths/inhibitors, 
• capability performance index, 
• etc

This is why so many businesses are turning to smaller, more modular projectized environments.  To help get work done try to break down the work and then also the definitions of value/success and performance into smaller, simpler, more manageable pieces. Take shorter term views (temporary with a distinct start and finish) with staged, formal milestones from the very start to very end. Understand there will be uniqueness to the project based on variables of the people and the risks at that given time. Draw upon the past, leverage a common platform from which to work from, but then be agile and open since if a business process is not working, persist, persist, adapt and overcome.

Sample tools include:
1) Intangible Assessment:  once you have the requirements, step back and reassess from the higher level (put your CEO hat on) and question the theory side of things, the value definitions, the justifications. Clearly formalize how you define value, success and performance.  Then understand a process how to adapt if those definitions start to change as the project gains clarity (so if the project changes, then revisit and adapt the definitions as needed - be realistic).

2) Tool Re-Assessment: re-assess the concrete systems, tools, templates and technical practices, confirm if they are well aligned with both the work and the team, understand the difference between policies, procedures and guidelines (which are which)

3) Org Design Assessment: assess the team in place, do not be afraid to change it, it is nothing personal, tooooo often we do not properly allocate the people to the prioritized work, we set the people into their jobs, then new jobs take who ever is available, ensure the culture is open that people will be moving around based on the business priorities and the fit between the job and the people

4) Milestone Check Points:  schedule far in advance (entire project) the milestone checkpoints that focus on critical success factors (CSFs) and have a formalized process to do so. Try to avoid pure gut-feel decisions and utilize graphs to supplement the progress.  Some checkpoints may take days to prepare and execute, other checkpoints may take hours. If things are not working to plan, do not be afraid, you need to understand why (not only what) and then understand who are the right people to involve.  Often the opportunity for improvement (OFI) is with the people and how they understand and respect the processes and technologies they have available - in order to help everyone achieve "Business Success".

Often if things are going well, or we win, or we achieve our goal/complete the project, we then go into "cruise mode".  

We lose our sense of creativity to try new approaches and even more common, we lose our desire to take risk (with risk comes failure, stress and often finger pointing so lets just do the same old thing as long as it works - don't touch/play with it).

After seeing a show about rock climbing, it reminded me how humans have some type of inner desire, to constantly grow.... it is an exciting aspect of our species. But we can always learn to be more comfortable with risk and innovation.

A famous rock climbing site is in the USA, called Nose of El Capitan (Yosemite National Park).

The site was considered one of the top challenges a climber could face.  Then, people started to set their focus on it and finally, someone set a new record:

1 - an assisted climb was completed in 45 days (this made the news and he became famous, he dominated the sport and stated how it had to be done)

then, years later,

2 - an assisted climb was completed in 1 day (how is this possible, people could not believe it, again, the climber became famous and legendary... obviously that record will not be broken)

then, years later,

3 - a free climb (no ropes/assistance) was completed in 1 day (now this is making people think differently about the sport, and what people used to think, how is that possible). Also, even more troublesome for some people to wrap their brain around it, is that the climber was a woman (Lynn Hill).

then, years later,

4 - a free climb was completed in 12 hours (wow, what next......)

I was amazed, so many stories are right there in front of us, constantly teaching us about continued growth, learning and advancement. Look at old problems from a new angle, things can always be better.

I had to read more about the sport and the stories and the history, since it is a fairly new sport.  It consisted of so many people that went into a new level of thinking, innovation and creativity will lead down paths that the previous project/person had not even considered - and could lead to earth shaking results.

Somehow, people find a way!   How do they find a way.......  after reading more about the climbers that broke the records, and continue to do so, a few things I believe they all had (tools that they posses to break into new levels of success):

- persistence 

- passion

- creativity 

- confidence

- collaboration

- discipline

- understanding the important link between physical body and mental mind

- non-judgemental and open

Lynn Hill

On May 9, 1989, she fell during a climb in Buoux, France; after forgetting to tie a safety rope, she fell 85 ft (25 m) into a tree, and was knocked unconscious, dislocated her elbow and broke her foot. She had been training hard for the World Cup and had to stop competing for a few months to recover; she was devastated to miss the first World Cup in the sport. This is where she could retire and live out her life.

MS Project is not an easy tool, but it creates one of the best Gannt Chart or Schedule display tools you can get.

People ask for a simple guideline that can be followed to create a Baseline for the Schedule.

Note: I also recommend following this if you are looking to track real costs, or levels of "Effort" (as PMI would call it) but in the MS Project software it is called "Work". One must clearly understand if you are tracking Calendar Time vs Duration vs Work.  Each tells a different story and has their place.

12 Steps Before Baseline and the Sequence to do it in, includes:

1)  Project Start Date (Project - Project info)

2)  Calendar (Project – Change working time)

3)  Effort Driven Schedule (File - Options – Schedule)

·        New tasks created (Auto)

·        Work is entered in: (Days)

·        Default task type (Fixed Work)

Note: Duration = Work/Units

(Advanced – Display Options)

·        Show Project summary task

4)  Task Entry (Deliverables, Work Packages, Tasks)

5)  Activity Sequencing, Dependencies/Linking (FS then SS, FF)

6)  Resource Sheet (enter initials)

7)  Assign Resources to tasks

8)  Assign level of effort (Work)

·        Milestones (zero effort)

9)  Level resources, alter resources

10) Verifications

11) Set the baseline

12) Track Actuals and Progress (% work complete)

·        % Work Complete Column

·        Bar colours and styles, bar text

·        Critical Path (View – Highlight)

·        Red/Dashed Status Date (Project - Status Date – right click gridlines)

I took an EQ Assessment & continually go back to it - to continually learn more about myself.

It puts a formal approach and more of a science around how I work with different types of people under different types of environments.  It is never black and white, however, this is essentially a tool that lets me grow in one of the most critical aspects of project management and business (relationships).

Objectives of this assessment were to self-identify how well one can manage relationships in the midst of uncertainty (and thus this will also include how we manage risk, complexity, conflict and stress).

The assessment talked about 3 key building blocks.  By studying and understanding them, one can build tolerance, resilience, and adaptability, and give new capabilities to relate more effectively with others.

It is so important to realize how projects are managed today versus in the past.  The focus today is so much more on the "people side" vs the "systems side", and thus must include a focus on both yourself and the external people you interact with. 

There are many assessments out there, the three core capacities that were focused on for my assessment included:

1) Self-Reflection

Self-Reflection is the ability to access and name our experience, including our feelings, thoughts, wants, intentions, and body sensations, and the ability to observe our thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the moment as we participate in life. Having the ability to first experience and name our experience, to differentiate our experience from others, and to reflect and learn from our experience is fundamental to emotional intelligence, the very driver of our capacity to learn and grow. It is key to know one-self.

2) Self-Regulation

Experiencing varying levels of distress and pain is a natural part of life. This causes us to feel some degree of disequilibrium. Self-soothing is the capacity to experience our distress and manage it in ways that help us reestablish our equilibrium or balance without requiring others to change. We all soothe ourselves and our emotions daily in a variety of positive and negative ways, both alone and in relationship. It is key to measure how we regulate our emotions.

3) Empathy

Empathy is the ability to identify and analyze what another person is experiencing and to know what that must be like; to "get into another person's shoes." Deep empathy also will include an understanding how the other person is feeling. It is key to measure our levels of accuracy and compassion.

For more details, can start by visiting sample websites below of some great people that know this area:

http://www.knollandassociates.ca/programs/

http://learninginaction.com/free-download/
(Note: the link above also has a free download)