Tuckman's Five Stages Of Managing A Project Team

Managing a project team means: set the responsibilities of each member, allocate them according to their capacities, influence them, ensure the professional behavior and develop the members. Tuckman¹ proposes a scale with five stages of group development: Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning.
In any circumstances creating a high-functioning team is challenging. When managing a team with overseas members, ensuring that every part of the team has the right package of responsibilities, is rightly allocated, behave professionally and goes through these five stages of development correctly can be even more challenging. Time-zone, geography and culture are aspects that can impact on the project.
The article “Are your global team members
The lack of definition to each member’s role and responsibilities usually makes each member to try to work its own space, its own part of the project, without considering others. In this case, the work ends up having no integration, even if each team member had worked hard and well.
Without a proper protocol for decision making, the project’s development goes slow, with many conflicts and mistakes that will demand rework. People’s culture can get in the way of the decision making process, making it inappropriate for members of other cultures. Moreover, all decisions have to pursuit the same set of goals in the project.
To avoid the mentioned risks, a structured communications management plan is needed. According to PMBOK³, the number of potential communication ways is an indicator of the project complexity. This number, calculated as n(n-1)/2 (where ‘n’ represents the number or stakeholders involved), allows the manager to pay attention on how each communication is going to happen. With an overseas team is especially important to track the communications and make sure the messages sent and received are
It has to be easy to use, correctly display information to the people that need that information and use a language that everyone involved will understand. A storage basis has to be chosen (preferably a cloud unit), where documents can be accessed and edited by everybody that needs them in any part of the world. A good information security plan is needed in this case too.
Furthermore, the manager has to determine the channels used for everyone to communicate. Virtual meetings, email, instant messages, webinars etc. Every team member has to know how to communicate in each situation before the project starts. Of course it is not possible to define a protocol for all situations, but it is important that the team has at least a notion.
The purpose of the kick-off meeting is to define all base elements for the project4. With an overseas team, it is recommended that documents from the planning phase are distributed before the meeting, so everybody has information and questions about the project. The meeting can happen via video call. For it to work, the manager has to choose an appropriate time (considering time-zones) and a protocol for speaking, in which each person has its time to speak. A writing channel to follow the video call can be very useful. An agenda can be as follows:
- Clarify the project: reinforce the goals and answer