Creating a Plan for Positive Influence

Creating a Plan for Positive Influence

"A team is a collection of individuals who are interdependent in their tasks, who share responsibility for outcomes, who see themselves and who are seen by others as an intact social entity embedded in one or more larger social systems and who manage their relationships across organizational boundaries” (Xin, 2010).

My team has been assigned a project that is estimated to take one year to complete. When given a year to complete a project, this can seem like a long drawn-out task and one may not be ready for all the obstacles that may arise over an extended term from business or team issues.

The steps that need to be taken to begin this project would be: (1) hold a discovery meeting; (2) create a project plan; and (3) project implementation.

The first step is holding a discovery meeting to determine what is needed to complete the project. The deliverable of this meeting is to define the scope of objective.

The next step would be to create a project plan with the team so there is buy-in from team members and all are aware of what the end goal is. This would define the requirements that are expected from each team member, inform members of the budget, what the anticipated timeline is and how many members will be on the project.

While we are creating the project plan it is very important to consider all team member opinions as if they count. It is also a good idea to know what the strength and weaknesses of each team member is so that talents are utilized to the fullest so the team’s success is assured. Most teams consistently fail to maximize their members’ expertise, which results in lower-quality decisions and outcomes of their objectives. To effectively use team member’s expertise, of whatever kind, the team must first recognize that individual contribution is as valuable to completing its task (Gardner, 2012).

After the plan has been completed, the next step is project implementation. This is when the final...