MGT 645 Module 3 The Project Team Example

Engineers, Bakers and a Quality Manager in One Room: Chartering and Leading a Gluten-Free Line Project Team

Student Name

Master of Business Administration, Aspen University

MGT 645: Project Management Essentials

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Engineers, Bakers and a Quality Manager in One Room: Chartering and Leading a Gluten-Free Line Project Team

Chippewa Valley Pizza Company's gluten-free line, the composite Eau Claire project followed in this course, needs people from nearly every part of the plant. The project manager, the plant's engineering manager, will lead a core team of nine: a process engineer, the second-shift production supervisor, the quality manager, a maintenance lead, a research and development baker who will adapt recipes, a sales account manager who works with the two grocery customers, a procurement specialist for gluten-free ingredients, a food safety coordinator and a production scheduler. Most have worked in the plant for years, but rarely together, and each reports to a functional manager with other priorities. This paper plans how the team will be formed and led.

What Successful Project Managers Do

Müller and Turner (2010) studied project managers rated successful and examined their intellectual, managerial and emotional competencies. They found that profiles differed by project type, but that emotional competencies such as influence, motivation, conscientiousness and sensitivity, along with critical thinking, often distinguished the most successful. For a project whose team members do not report to the project manager, influence and motivation matter especially. The engineering manager is strong in technical judgment; the competencies she must develop are influence across functions and sensitivity to members' competing loyalties.

Team Factors and Project Success

Scott-Young and Samson (2008) studied capital projects in process industries and examined how team management related to cost, schedule and the operability of what was built. Team-related factors, such as keeping core members on the project rather than rotating them and having the right mix of functions involved, were associated with better outcomes. Plants often pull people off projects when daily production is pressed, and the study suggests the cost of doing so is real.

Teaming

Edmondson (2012) described teaming as the way people collaborate when they come together quickly, often across functions, to do work no one can do alone. Effective teaming depends on four practices: speaking up, collaboration, experimentation and reflection, all of which require psychological safety, a shared sense that voicing a worry will not be held against the person who voices it. In a food safety project, speaking up is not optional; a team member who notices a cross-contact risk and stays silent could undo the entire project.

Team Charter

Members' Divided Loyalties

Each member answers to a functional manager whose priorities differ from the project's. The production supervisor is judged on daily output, the sales account manager on quarterly revenue and the maintenance lead on keeping the main lines running. When daily pressures rise, project work loses. The engineering manager cannot remove these loyalties, but she can make them visible: each member's functional manager will attend the kickoff, see the project's importance to the company and agree on how conflicts between daily work and project work will be settled.

Different Languages

The team's functions speak different languages. Engineers talk in specifications and tolerances, the baker in hydration and crumb, the quality manager in hazards and critical control points, the sales manager in listings and shelf dates. Misunderstandings across these vocabularies cause many of the problems in cross-functional projects. The team will keep a short shared glossary and, at each meeting, ask a member from another function to restate key decisions in their own words.

Protecting Continuity

Following Scott-Young and Samson, the sponsor will sign agreements with each member's functional manager reserving a set share of time, from 20% for sales to 60% for the process engineer, through start-up. If production pressure rises, the sponsor, not the project manager, will negotiate any change.

When the Team Disagrees

Disagreements will come, most likely between production, which wants procedures simple enough to run at speed, and quality, which wants procedures strict enough to pass any audit. The charter's decision rights settle safety questions in quality's favor, but the team will first try to find procedures that satisfy both, testing them on the mock-up. A decision imposed without trying would be followed reluctantly on the night shift.

Building Trust

The team will begin with a two-day kickoff at the plant, walking the planned room together and agreeing the charter. Members will pair across functions on early tasks, such as the baker and procurement specialist sourcing flour together. Every other Friday, a fifteen-minute review will ask what the team learned and what it should do differently, Edmondson's reflection in practice.

The Project Manager's Development

Müller and Turner's findings give the engineering manager a personal plan. She will ask the sponsor for monthly feedback on how she influences members she does not manage, and will practice opening team meetings by asking each function what is blocking it before presenting her own updates. Influence across functions, not technical knowledge, is the skill this project will test most.

Bringing In Outsiders

The equipment vendor's installers and the construction contractor will join the team for months during installation. Teaming research suggests treating them as members for that period: they will attend the weekly meeting, receive the charter and be invited to raise concerns like anyone else, rather than being managed only through contracts.

Measures

The team will track milestone delivery, the number of concerns raised early, member time actually spent on the project and a quarterly survey on whether members feel safe speaking up.

Conclusion

Müller and Turner's competency research guides the project manager's own focus, Scott-Young and Samson's evidence justifies protecting team continuity and Edmondson's teaming practices shape a charter in which anyone can stop work that threatens safety.

References

Edmondson, A. C. (2012). Teaming: How organizations learn, innovate, and compete in the knowledge economy. Jossey-Bass.

Müller, R., & Turner, R. (2010). Leadership competency profiles of successful project managers. International Journal of Project Management, 28(5), 437-448. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2009.09.003

Scott-Young, C., & Samson, D. (2008). Project success and project team management: Evidence from capital projects in the process industries. Journal of Operations Management, 26(6), 749-766. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2007.10.006