This is a good article with some excellent insights. It’s good to see such strong recognition of the disproportionately large contribution that small project teams play. Just as small businesses disproportionately contribute to the nation’s economy (in terms of employment, if nothing else) so do small projects contribute every day in excess of what their sizes would predict. They are the pilot projects that point the way and guide the planning of large projects. They are the initiatives that organizations undertake to explore possible new products, technologies, processes, or management initiatives, thereby shaping those organizations for some time to come. And they include the initial projects of each new generation of project managers, building the foundation of their practical project management skills and setting the stage for their later professional and career management.

Despite such important roles, I don’t think there has been enough attention to the art and science of directing small project teams. As you point out, small project team management is not just a miniaturization of large project management. The small project team manager must serve the same principles, but will need to do so with a very different approach than someone running a large project due to the qualitative differences in their challenges and dynamics. For example, small project team managers are usually managing without a safety net since their smaller schedule and budget don’t allow much room to recover from errors or unanticipated circumstances.

From my personal experience running projects large and small though, it seems that the most striking difference between large and small project teams has not been in management as much as in leadership. In small project teams, the manager interacts with everyone on the team and becomes very familiar with each of their challenges, abilities, orientation towards their tasks, and the issues they confront in their day-to-day project assignments. It’s therefore easy if not inevitable to maintain a relationship with each team member that helps to promote their and the team’s success. A project manger cannot use team-wide personal leadership in large projects, however. Instead, he or she must exercise leadership through the task and activity team managers using the dynamics of organizational leadership. Those are very different models involving very different approaches that can cause some problems if confused. You can often see this happen when a manger used to running small project teams takes over his or her first large project team. And vice-versa.

Thanks of the great article and I look forward to your future articles on this topic.

Frank O’Mara

This is an excellent and unique article! I’m very interested in reproducing the article on PM Hut. In case you are OK with it, then please use the “Contact Us” form on the PM Hut site and we’ll take it from there.