Teamwork in Project Management: 13 Reasons To Embrace It

Project managers across the globe agree that good teamwork results in faster completion of tasks, increased productivity and a healthy work environment.

It improves team spirit and empowers the team to easily overcome obstacles during the project work. That’s why teamwork is critical for project management.

So, what is Teamwork?

Teamwork is the process of bringing different individuals together for completing a project efficiently and effectively. However, any manager who’s handled a team will agree that achieving robust teamwork is way more complex than this definition.

While resourcing various people is a tough process in itself, the act of getting them to work together without collisions, disputes, and differences needs a lot of expertise. It requires patience, persistence, compassion, empathy, soft skills and great interpersonal skills.

Despite how difficult it sounds, every project manager that has completed their project with the best teamwork will confirm that the pain is worth it. We’ll be covering the process of achieving robust team work in a different article. For now, let’s take a look at some of the reasons why you should strive to achieve it.

Why Teamwork is Essential in Project Management

There are few reasons that can explain it:

Smooth Flow of Projects

It’s understood that managing a project can be a bumpy ride because of scope creep, increased timelines, managing demands of clients, and satisfying stakeholders involved.

When you work as a team effectively, you will be able to easily schedule and address ongoing requirements as well as additional requests without breaking a sweat.

And by doing so, your project milestones will be met within scheduled timelines.

Effective Management of Material Resources

Every project requires an X amount of material resources to start executing the project.

Some projects may require a smaller number of resources while some require high-levels of procurement. Costing in millions of dollars.

If your team is not cohesive, you might end up exhausting a lot of resources within a short time. Resulting in increased costs to complete the project.

On the flipside, if you work perfectly as a team you will consult with each other about the resources for a certain task and what are the best ways to use them.

This ensures that there are no overhead costs during the execution process.

Enables a Creative Approach

When team members trust each other, they tend to share ideas and brainstorm on multiple aspects of the project.

This fosters creativity and often results in creative solutions to various project related problems.

Also, every unique idea that’s generated may result in developing better strategies to complete the project within the scheduled time.

Let’s not forget that each of your team members has a great deal of knowledge. By working together effectively, you will learn from each other and achieve creative results.

Improves Risk Appetite

“Unity is Strength” – an old saying that we’re well aware about.

Managing a project and working together as a team gives you the strength and appetite to take risks. This is generally not plausible when working alone as the fear of failure will creep in and sometimes you may fail.

However, teamwork provides support to each team member so the risk you’re taking (after prior discussions) will not fall apart.

It’s understood that effective risk management is part of a project manager’s job. If you can bring your team together then you can easily mitigate all the risks you face.

Improves Conflict-Resolution

Humans fight. Period.

The same applies in project management too. You’ll have team members from various walks of life, so it is no surprise if you witness disputes.

But when a good understanding is established between team members, it becomes easy for the manager to annihilate the conflict.

Creates a Lot of Trust

Trust is the central piece or the foundation stone to every relationship. Be it personal or professional.

Teamwork founded on trust between each team member results in a healthy work environment and interpersonal relationships.

Trusting team members often help each other through multiple hurdles, which leads to higher productivity. It increases confidence in individual abilities as well as boosts the credibility of the PM.

Combines Various Strengths for Common Goal

Every team member has a set of skills which they are quite good at. One might be great at planning while the other might do a great job in team coordination. With good teamwork, you can bring in all these different sets of skills together to achieve the goals of the project efficiently.

Though you may think that diverse opinions can result in conflict, in reality, they provide different views to approach problems, create strategies, and even new opportunities.

Enhances Accountability

Not every day is our best day. Sometimes, we don’t want to give our best and be lazy. However, a team working together with mutual respect will drive each member to stay accountable for the task undertaken. They will feel the unspoken peer pressure to not let the team down because of their unwillingness.

This applies not only for the team members of the project but also the stakeholders involved in it.

Improves Project Execution

It should not come as a surprise that good teamwork improves project execution. It increases the speed of completing each task, which would not be possible if you are working alone. The pools of various skill sets combined together enables this possibility.

In fact, you will be flying on cloud nine when all the right people join forces to achieve very difficult results.

Also, time is on your side when you work together as a team.

Effective Feedbacks

You may have set up all the necessary project dashboards, automated check ins, and monitoring to track the team’s progress. However, the best feedback is the one you give & get informally and during day-to-day activities. This is only possible when there is enough amount of trust among the team members.

You can also create regular meetings and get the best results out of them because each team member is willing to participate without any hesitation.

Project managers can also inform the team to be wary of the feedback they receive from each other as well as stakeholders and clients.

According to Jessica Ulloa, Community Manager at MyPerfectResume, “When it comes to project management two heads think better than one and when you work as a team you are able to better anticipate problems and find more effective solutions. A good tip is to assign tasks based on your team’s strengths, knowledge and skills. This would also make it easier to trust that your team is doing a great job and contributing ideas that only they can come up with while you focus on the things you are good at.”

Easily Resolve Complex Problems

Encountering complex problems happens in every project. And any project manager who thinks that he or she can handle it alone will face disaster. You need your team to resolve complex problems. When you have a good teamwork built in then your subject matter experts will pitch in immediately to get the ball rolling.

As mentioned earlier, team work generates unique and creative ideas to resolve problems. The same can be applied to any complex problem with a huge risk. Even if your team cannot get you a solution, they may connect you with their network of connections that can potentially help you achieve resolution.

Easily Delegate New Requests

Every task in a project is dependent on another task. However, scope creep and ad hoc requests happen every other day in a project. These requests tend to increase the burden on the team and also increase dependencies.

When you have solid team work going on, then this process of delegating new tasks will not be so hard as the team is willing to go an extra mile to get things done.

On the contrary, poor team work and team collaboration will drastically affect the overall deadline.

Everybody Owns Their Work

It is often thought that a good lead is essential to get work done on time. However, that is far from the truth. In cooperative and well-meaning teams, everybody owns their tasks perfectly and therefore, there is no real need for a micromanaging leader.

Only the project manager can track all the details of the work being executed and communicate when necessary.

Strive to Achieve a Robust Teamwork Today

As you can see these are the many reasons and benefits for establishing good team work. If you want to get tasks done faster and improve the speed of your projects then start working on it today.

You may want to start by answering questions such as: “What can I do to improve teamwork quality?” Or “How can I bring all these different people together?”