Accountability is essential to the success of every project.
The Project Manager is ultimately responsible for the project’s success, but to succeed, he should seek from the project team to be accountable and to hold each other accountable.
He should establish the best approach to maintain Project team accountability by empowering the entire team, emphasizing transparency, communication, teamwork, and motivation. Regardless of the project methodology applied, the attitude of the project team should be agile.
His role starts during the hiring process. He should hire the ideal candidates and provide them with the required trainings and tools to enable them to successfully achieve the required tasks.
Project managers should set clear and smart objectives for the project team and for each member.
During the planning phase, he should involve the team. He should set for each task the “Input” including the prerequisites or the dependencies on another tasks, the output, the acceptance criteria, and the estimated duration to complete tasks related to them.
The project kickoff meeting is the best opportunity not only to motivate the team, build a team and get them excited about the project but also to communicate clear expectations and objectives for the team and for each member. He should establish starting the project a clear system of accountability.
During execution phase, he should make sure that the team run standup meetings on daily basis and retrospective meetings on weekly basis where each member provides updates on his tasks and STAR feedback. Project manager should establish reporting tool accessible by all Project Team.
Follow up, evaluation, Communication and transparency are important not only to encourage the team but also to discuss the reason of low performance to understand the reason, push the team to give the best outcome, to coach and to take the suitable actions for the project success.