Investigating the effect of team grouping principles on project success

M.Ing. (Engineering Management)The survival of organisations during the recent recession in South Africa and the rest of the world forced them to eliminate unnecessary expenditure, ineffective personnel and processes. The drive towards maximum project success became essential in order to survive. The researcher identified a concern within a technical team in the Transnet Freight Rail (TFR), a major rail based transport company. The research problem as identified is: That project teams are compiled randomly or by availability of personnel which promotes possible project failure and not by competency and without regard to team role efficiency. The researcher decided to investigate the influence of compiling a project team where the team members function within their preferred team roles. It was found that the Belbin Self Perception Inventory (SPI) is an effective instrument to determine the preferred team roles of project team members. This study is a qualitative one. A literature study supported the fact that employing team members in their preferred team roles does make a noticeable difference to the productivity of individual team members and the team. A failed project was identified within the TFR technical team. The Belbin SPI instrument was used to determine the preferred team roles of all the team members for the chosen project. The actual team roles performed by every member in the chosen project were determined by means of an interview with the team leader. The data obtained from the SPI was compared with the interview data and it was found that three of the four team members involved in the chosen project were not employed within their preferred team roles. This lead to a conclusion that, should the team members have been employed in their preferred team roles, their project would have been much more likely of being successful. This study points the way to a further quantitative study where the possibility of predicting project success could be investigated