A Recipe For An Amazing Project Team

 
Successful businesses need to make money, and there’s only one real way of doing this: to solve a problem for their customers. Look at any great product or service, and you’ll see time and time again that they’re rooted in one big, unfulfilled need experienced by a certain demographic of people. Dig a little deeper, and you’ll find that behind the ability to successfully fulfil this need, there’s a highly-organised team that can form a solid plan and stick to it. If your business is growing rapidly, and you’re finding that certain things are slipping out of your control, here are some ways to organise your operation for better success.
Let More People Make Decisions
All too often, the big decisions at a business are pushed up the pyramid to upper management, and placed in the hands of people who have very little knowledge of the task itself. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that every decision that’s going to impact the business has to be passed up to management. Sure, the final decision can rest in the hands of someone in the upper echelons of the company, but it needs to be informed by someone who’s more directly involved in the task at hand. By empowering more people to make important decisions, it will speed up the whole decision-making process, and encourage a greater sense of ownership in all of your employees.
Make Sure Strategic Planning Focuses on Solutions
Once you’ve spent enough time in business, you’ll start to realise that what’s commonly called “strategic planning” – where the higher-ups sit around a table and try to get a sense of where the company is going – can easily become nothing but a massive waste of time, and can divert time and energy away from the areas where it’s really needed. It may be hard to get everyone out of old habits, but you need to make sure there’s a strong focus on the problems you’re solving for your target market. Revenue projections and other forecasts can wait. When a lot of teams get started with project specifications development, it’s far too common for their overarching aim, to supply a brilliant product or service, to take a back seat. When this is at the core of every decision, the numbers will follow naturally.
Think of Self-Interest as a Good Thing
When you boil it all down, people will always interact with businesses according to their self-interest. This is as true for employees just as much as it is for customers.  This is the one universal truth at the core of marketing, and it’s an important thing to be aware of in your project management and organisation too. Instead of fighting or denying it, like many start-up owners seem to do, you should be leveraging this natural selfishness, and aligning individual self-interest with the best interests of the whole company. Part of this should be rewarding your managers for moving people out of their various groups when they discover a better use for them elsewhere.
Put Intelligence Over Skills When Hiring
One thing that holds back the organisational makeup of countless promising start-ups is the way they run recruitment drives. It may feel natural to look at the candidate’s resume before anything else, and make those final hiring decisions based solely on qualifications and experience. However, if you want to have a workforce that really takes the business places, it’s important to look past their professional passport. You can always teach skills, but you can’t teach intelligence. Don’t hire someone just for the skills they possess. Hire someone for their raw intelligence, and their drive to succeed and compete within an organisation. Some of the smartest professionals I’ve ever encountered have come from universities and colleges near the bottom of the league tables. If they’re put together the right way, they’ll learn swiftly and really hit the ground running. By the same token, there are many people on the modern job market who have all the skills you’d want for a job, but approach the role itself with a distinct sense of apathy, which will only drag the whole organisation down. I’m sure you’ll agree that the most interesting problems in a professional environment are ones that you’ve never encountered before, especially within a small business. Target people who have what it takes to think outside the box and offer creative solutions to age-old problems.
Put Less Emphasis on Seniority
Hires, promotions and terminations should always be based on merit, never seniority alone. I’m sure you’ve had to work with at least one person before who had this massive sense of entitlement and authority, all because they’ve worked at the organisation for longer than their peers. Even when it’s the most junior members who are coming up with the best ideas and putting in the most work, those people who have been with the business the longest talk and act like they’re the person everyone is looking to for a good example. Don’t let anyone feel like they’re getting a free ride! Everyone from the office janitor to the CEO should be coming in and earning their job title every day.
Don’t Let Your Customer Base Manage Your Business
If you want your business to be successful, then you’ll have to organise it around your customer base to some degree. Make sure you’re probing them for feedback on your product or service, and going out of your way to find out what their main pain points are. This will give you great insight on what the problem you’re meant to solve is. However, you should never let your customer base dictate the solution, as much as they love to do this! When you live and breathe your product or service, it can be easy to overlook some big, glaring issues. However, when it comes to the solution, the only people who should be in control should be you and your team. Don’t sacrifice a strong sense of organisation just to pander to your customer base!