From Project Management to Team Integration: Key Issues in the Management of the Human Resource in Projects

The non-repetitive nature of projects, globalization, the growing number of distributed project teams, and the substantial number of high-tech projects in which the human brain is the most important resource are just few of the forces making human resource management in projects a critical success factor. These conditions challenge not only project team members' ability to collaborate, but also the capacity of the project manager to effectively manage human resources and to facilitate a collaborative work environment. The quantitative aspects of project management, such as scheduling, budgeting, and resource management, are supported by a large array of tools and techniques, many of them based on operations research methodologies and integrated into commercially available software for project management. However, these commercial software packages for project management offer very little support for the development and management of project teams.