Root-Cause Analysis of Project Team Ineffectiveness

Subject: Employee Management
Pages: 1
Words: 341
Reading time:
2 min
Study level: College

The abbreviation RCA stands for root cause analysis, which is the process of discovering solutions to the problem by identifying its root causes. The major advantage of RCA is that it makes it possible to fully understand why a problem has happened, how to fix it, and how to avoid it in the future. RCA unites several methodologies and techniques for analyzing issues such as change, barrier, and cause analysis. The present paper applies RCA to solve the problem of the low effectiveness of project teams.

If a team frequently fails to follow the deadlines, create a promising project, or complete an assigned task appropriately, such a team’s effectiveness is low. In general, such a situation might occur due to a variety of reasons. However, the application of the RCA makes it possible to focus on the specific case of this team and discover unique causes of the problem.

It is necessary to analyze the opinion of team members on the performance of their group. The analysis of the group conducted by the manager reveals that eight of ten respondents argue that the leadership clearly transmits the requirements. Consequently, the problem lies not in the fact that they do not know what to do. Instead, it was noticed that the level of trust between the team members was low. The extent of collaboration in a team and, hence, the success of a project depends on the level of trust between the participants (Bond-Barnard et al., 2018). This way, it becomes clear that the administration should focus on increasing trust between the team members.

To improve the performance of a project team, it could be recommended to conduct several team-building activities that would help colleagues to get to know each other better. In addition to that, it might be effective to encourage interaction between the team members in an informal setting during non-working hours. At the same time, it should be noted that the conducted analysis is applicable to only one team in one organization and might be useless in other cases.

Reference

Bond-Barnard, T. J., Fletcher, L., & Steyn, H. (2018). Linking trust and collaboration in project teams to project management success. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 11(2), 432 – 457. Web.