Team composition and structure is considered as a part of planning performance domain. However, other issues about the project team, team building, management, and leadership will be covered under team performance domain.
You can implement a project by bringing together a group of people that you have gathered without adhering to certain criteria. Or there is no obstacle for you to involve a group of professionals in the project according to the competencies required by the project. As a matter of fact, this is how team composition is done in many projects.
Why is team composition important?
What do you think will be the chances of this project being successful? For sure the first step to compose a team is always determining the required skills to accomplish project work along with the proficiency levels and experience of candidates. However, this is not enough to build a good team structure. Planning for a project team should always be a studious project activity. The necessity to colocate project team or prepare a virtual work environment is decisions to be taken in the planning stage.
Whatever we plan for team composition and structure, we should take care of harmony between team members and their skillsets. This is like determining the parts of a well-performing machine. However, people are quite more complex beings than machines, so this part of project management is of immeasurable importance.
Five Aspects of Team Composition
Roles and responsibilities: Defining roles and responsibilities in a project team is part of conflict management. In this way, problems and conflicts that have the potential to damage the project are prevented, and it becomes easier for the project to reach the planned output.
Abilities: The diversity of abilities already benefits in all areas where a team needs to be created, such as sports, competitions. In this way, team members can learn new things from each other by seeing each other's talents in project management, or new things can be revealed by blending the talents of team members.
Personalities: Personalities of the team members contribute to the successful implementation of the project's processes. The presence of members with different personalities in the team contributes to the development of the project by providing diversity. Because a project needs personalities of different types.
Diversity: Adopting the diversity of team members as a principle contributes to increasing the problem solving ability of the team, managing constructive conflicts and reaching a conclusion, increasing the creativity level of the team and better understanding of different ethnicities/ cultures.
Size: A certain team size should be preferred at the planning stage of each project. Because the size of the project team can directly affect the effectiveness of the project. When determining the size of this team, many factors such as the output, roles and responsibilities that will be achieved at the end of the project, the expectations of the team members, the working conditions of the team, the size of the project are taken into account.