Team Health
Feb 24 2011
Project Team Composition
In a technical consulting engagement, is it more beneficial to utilize an integrated project team in which consultants and full time employees work side-by-side, or to have a team fully comprised of consultants that hands off the deliverables when the project comes to an end? This question comes up frequently for both consulting companies and their clients. I would venture to say that there is no right answer, as I have been a part of both integrated and all-consultant teams, and have experienced various levels of success on each. There are definitely aspects of projects and clients that make one type of team or the other more appropriate, but these factors are often hard to identify. So here are some general observations about the two options.
Nov 02 2010
Project Team Health: a Casualty of Business-as-Usual
While trying to address the perennial SCRUM-versus-waterfall question by researching project success rates, I came upon an interesting article in Dr. Dobb's Journal. After surveying over 300 project management practitioners with expertise in both Agile and traditional methodologies, the Journal was able to quantify success for 71% of Agile projects and 61% “traditional” projects. Whether this implies that self-organization effectively mitigates at least some risks, or that Agile projects are more disciplined than is commonly perceived, remains open to interpretation [more on this in my next blog entry], but even more interesting were the trends about workplace health, as documented almost as an afterthought on the survey’s periphery[1].