The Impact of Team Work on Project Success

This research paper analyses the impact of teamwork on project success, with a case study of Queensland Health Payroll System. It focuses on the role of leadership in team management and the importance of communication among team members. The paper proposes strategies to enhance team contribution and recommends best team management practices.

Running Head: THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS 1
Executive Summary
The teamwork is an inevitable aspect for the success of any project and team
performance. Teamwork ensures better utility of resources, talent and skills of teammates for
better profitability and achievement. On the other hand it helps in developing a better personality
and develops different human recourse skills of the employees. Like leadership qualities,
teamwork brings out communicative and creative skills of teammates. This helps in solving
every problem for the team. Teamwork ensures that the project is completed in the most
economical way and highest profit for the company. The research is performed on a case study
‘Queensland Health Payroll System’ that was one of the biggest failure in the field of the IT
industry. It has been selected as the case study for the project as the major cause behind the
failure was improper management and poor teamwork.

2THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................4
Aim of the Research........................................................................................................................4
Project Scope...................................................................................................................................4
Background and Rationale...............................................................................................................4
Objectives........................................................................................................................................5
Expected Results..............................................................................................................................5
Management and Implementation...................................................................................................6
Monitoring and Evaluation..............................................................................................................7
Research Question...........................................................................................................................7
Hypothesis...................................................................................................................................8
Literature Review............................................................................................................................9
Analysing the better relationship approaches in QHS project.......................................................10
Research Methodology..................................................................................................................11
Limitation......................................................................................................................................11
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................12
Recommendations:........................................................................................................................12
References......................................................................................................................................14
Appendix........................................................................................................................................16

3THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS

4THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
Introduction
Teamwork can be explained as the process of performing collectively in a group of
people in order to accomplish a common goal. Team is about a group of talented individuals
from different backgrounds with a common goal. Teamwork helps to achieve higher benefit in a
more economical way without compromising quality and uniqueness of the project. Queensland
health payroll system is the selected case study and the research will focus on the problems
associated with the failure of the project. The concern is related to the team work and
management of the project within the estimated constraints.
Aim of the Research
The aim of the research is to identify the failures behind the Queensland health payroll
system and analyse the team work and project delivery in same weighing scales. This research
will also focus on the development of the strategies those could be helpful in enhancing the team
members contribution while delivering a certain project.
Project Scope
The scope of the project is to identify and analyse the project management attributes and
the contribution of the team work in the successful and efficient delivery of the project. This
paper will focus on the contribution of the team work in the delivery of a project.
Background and Rationale
Queensland Health Payroll System was estimated to manage the payroll system for the
employees of strength 80,000 along with 24,000 differing combinations. The project was
estimated to be completed under the budget AUD $ 6.9M for replacing the existing payroll
system in an automated system through the available resources by IBM. However, the project

5THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
was delayed by five years with an increment of AUD $836 million. The project was ranked in
one of the greatest failures. The major causes behind the project failure was the lack of
communication among the team members and the insufficient contribution of the team members
and the project managers. The research will focus on the secondary data analysis on the
contribution of the team members in the successful and efficient delivery of the project.
Objectives
Following is the set of the objectives those are considerable for the successful and
efficient delivery of the project:
To critically analyse the case study.
To propose the strategies those could be helpful in emphasizing on the contribution of a
team in the project delivery.
To propose the strategies those could have stopped the project from being a failure.
To recommend the best strategies of team management.
Expected Results
It is being expected that the positive benefits of the team members can be identified while
discussing the delivery of the project and management of the project strategies. The identified
results can be helpful in utilizing the theory and learnings for the future project and developing
the strategies accordingly that can meet the needs and requirements of the project. It is also being
expected that the conclusion of the research will be capable of enhancing the leadership
attributes and gain better experience while delivering such big projects.

6THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
Project Plan
Task Name Duration Start Finish
Teamwork in Project Management research 23 days Thu 18-10-18 Mon 19-11-18
Initiation 5 days Thu 18-10-18 Wed 24-10-18
Identification of the topic 2 days Thu 18-10-18 Fri 19-10-18
approval of topic 1 day Mon 22-10-18 Mon 22-10-18
Selection of case study 2 days Tue 23-10-18 Wed 24-10-18
Critical analysis on case study 1 day Tue 23-10-18 Tue 23-10-18
Identification of the causes that lea project
towards failure 1 day Tue 23-10-18 Tue 23-10-18
Planning 4 days Wed 24-10-18 Mon 29-10-18
Time estimation 1 day Wed 24-10-18 Wed 24-10-18
Budget estimation 2 days Thu 25-10-18 Fri 26-10-18
Resource estimation 1 day Thu 25-10-18 Thu 25-10-18
Stakeholder engagement 3 days Thu 25-10-18 Mon 29-10-18
Scope and objective identification 2 days Thu 25-10-18 Fri 26-10-18
Execution 5 days Mon 29-10-18 Fri 02-11-18
collection of reliable resources 1 day Mon 29-10-18 Mon 29-10-18
sorting most relevant articles 1 day Tue 30-10-18 Tue 30-10-18
literature review 2 days Wed 31-10-18 Thu 01-11-18
Documentation of collected information 1 day Fri 02-11-18 Fri 02-11-18
Monitoring and evaluating 8 days Mon 05-11-18 Wed 14-11-18
Checking checklist 3 days Mon 05-11-18 Wed 07-11-18
Proof reading paper 2 days Thu 08-11-18 Fri 09-11-18
Feedback from tutors 1 day Mon 12-11-18 Mon 12-11-18
Modification s necessary 2 days Tue 13-11-18 Wed 14-11-18
Project Closing 3 days Thu 15-11-18 Mon 19-11-18
Documenting collected and analysed
information 1 day Thu 15-11-18 Thu 15-11-18
submission of research 2 days Fri 16-11-18 Mon 19-11-18

7THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
Monitoring and Evaluation
The research will be evaluated based on the timeline and the list of activities mentioned
in the above table. The checklist will also be evaluated considering the management and delivery
of the entire project requirements. The final delivery should focus on the esti8mation and
identification of the strategies those could possibly help in understanding the benefits of the team
work and their responsibility throughout the project.
Research Question
 How leadership style can affect teamwork?
 How crucial could be the teamwork for the accomplishment of certain scope and
objectives of a project?
 What is the relation between the project success and the contribution made by the teams?
The research questions mentioned above will be analysed to understand the impact and
emphasis of the teamwork in the project successful delivery. To understand the impact of the
poor team work and better teamwork in the project success.
Hussein (2015) stated that the teamwork is a group of members with either same or
different education, experience, talents, and/or skills. Leadership is a trait of managing and
motivating the team members. Leaders for a team emerge, either elected or appointed in manner
to take the role. The aim of this research is to analyse how leadership style can affect teamwork.
The objectives of this research are as follows
 Analyse the role and importance of leadership in teamwork
 How leader could motivate or manipulate the team members towards
accomplishing the goals and objectives of the project.

8THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
 To analyse the importance of the communication between the team members and
leadership initiations.
In this context and selected scenario, leaders involved in certain projects are the
stakeholders. The survey will be analysing the leadership factor, team management, and success
of the project under unexperienced, experienced, educated, or leaders with other qualification or
traits. The quantitative and qualitative analysis will be driven for measuring the impact of the
leadership on the teamwork performance. A relationship will be established between the overall
outputs of the project performance and involved approaches from the perspective of the leaders.
Hypothesis
 Hº: Leaders and their approaches in the management of the team contribution and
involvement in the project management
 H¹: The role of the leaders in the management and delivery of the daily operational
activities directly linked with the project accomplishment.
 H²: Small, Medium, and Big size project management through the contribution made by
the team under the guidance of the project leader.
Literature Review
The impact of team-efforts and teamwork in project management is an undeniable fact.
The leader plays an important and crucial role in the management of the entire team and their
contribution in the progress of the project for meeting the expected outputs. The benefits of
better coordination and management of the team in achieving success of the project under the
guidance of better leader has been the point of concern in various literatures. This literature

9THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
review will be focusing on the leadership attributes and approaches of the leadership that could
be applied for the management of overall delivery of the project.
Sohmen (2013) stated in his paper about how the leadership and teamwork are
interconnected and one cannot survive without the other. In this paper the researcher explained
that a team cannot work properly without an efficient team lead and to identify the leadership
quality of a person he or she needs to be within teamwork. The researcher used different
leadership structures to analyse this theory and explained the relationship between leadership and
teamwork (Nicholas and Steyn 2017). This research work is one of those studies which
highlighted the impacts of teamwork on individual personality development of the team
members and how this is affecting the success of the project indirectly.
Zulch (2014) discussed the importance of teamwork managed by the leadership through
developing a sophisticated communication management plan in manner to successfully
accomplishing the target of a project. The researcher performed several survey using
questionnaires with relevant questions and feedbacks from different project management teams
of organizations working in different fields (Kerzner 2018). The results of this research make it
evident that building a proper communication among team members is the best leadership
quality and the key to success. This is best to utilize the expertise and skills of different expert
team members and bring out the best of everyone and assure higher profit for a team (Yun et al.
2016). Teamwork is the only way to develop a proper communication among employees and
building it is the responsibility of the team leader or manager. The best attribute of a successful
team leader is the way of building a communication channel among the team members and
develop a common goal for them all (Oakland and Marosszeky 2017). The researchers used
primary source of data to perform the survey by interviewing every candidate with a typical set

10THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
of questionnaires with the same set of questions and collected the feedback from everyone to
perform the research.
Turner (2016) shows that the impact of teamwork over the success of project
management and collective goal of a team is undeniable. Without a proper harmony within team-
efforts the leader of a team also cannot perform well and the failure of the team is inevitable.
However, impacts of teamwork on the success of a project are evitable in other ways too
(Banihashemi et al. 2017). In addition to this teamwork has a huge impact on developing and
improving the personality of other team members too. Everyone in a team is benefited by
teamwork. The other writers integrated the project management phases and tried to propose a
link between the different project phases and the cruciality of the individuals in the successful
delivery of those phases. Various researchers claimed that the successful delivery of the project
always depends on the contributions being made by the team members. Banihashemi et al.
(2017) stated that the individual contribution of every team member in the project can reflect in
the overall contribution of the entire team. Hence, they have also highlighted that the
professional and personal contribution of the team members is crucial for the overall
development of the project.
Analysing the better relationship approaches in QHS project: Effective communication
strategies could have stopped the project from being a failure. The lack of leadership does lead to
the delivery of the ineffective team work and thus, the project failed to meet the scope and the
objectives. The leadership pays important role in the delivery of the project and the team
management (Layton and Ostemiller 2017). They focus on assuring that every team member
contributes equally in the delivery and management of the entire work throughout the project
lifecycle. Team work and team management would have played a crucial role in the delivery of

11THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
the project within the estimated constraints. Moreover, the project management strategies have
not considered the communication strategy to be crucial for the delivery and management of the
entire project and thus, the project lacked in many aspects as described in the above summary
(Larson et al. 2014). Thus, Development of an effective communication strategy could have
helped the entire team to be concentrated and involved towards the successful and efficient
delivery of the project.
Research Methodology
Research approach of a study can be classified in two broad categories, first being
qualitative and the second being quantitative. While, quantitative focuses on broader aspect,
qualitative focuses on in-depth analysis (Hussain 2015). Hence, based on the aim of the paper,
qualitative data is more suitable for attaining the objective and hence has been selected. The data
for the study will be collected through two different aspects, the first being primary qualitative e
data collection where different knowledgeable Leadership, team management and other crucial
professionals will be interviewed. The interviews will be conducted using VoIP (Voice over IP)
services such as video call, email, audio call and other modes based on the comfort of the
participants (Lo lacono, Symonds and Brown 2016). The sample size will be 15 and the
sampling will be done using random sampling method.
The second data collection process will be secondary data collection where the secondary
sources will be evaluated for data collection. The analysis of the data will be done using ground
theory approach where patterns will be identified and summarised to conclude on the findings
(Pal, Ramamurthy and Mahajon 2016).

12THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
Limitation
The findings of the paper will be based on the case study of Queensland health payroll
system failure and the geographical domain of Australia and hence, cannot be generalised. The
findings of the paper will stay limited to Australia. Furthermore, not all the secondary sources
are available on internet for free and hence, it will limit the selection of most relevant secondary
sources.
Conclusion
The impact of teamwork is undeniable to perform better and accomplish a common goal.
Teamwork is the best way to utilize every possible resource available to a team and be creative
in achieving their goal. Besides goal accomplishment, there are other targets of a team which are
important for team members. A leader must identify the skills and expertise of the teammates
and put them in proper utility, set a better communication within the team so that teammates can
communicate in a better way and bring out a to accomplish the common target of the team.
Teamwork is always a considerable fact for developing different personality traits in much
effective and efficient way. The list includes understanding mentality to perform better in
groups, to achieve a common target building a balanced formal relationship with other
teammates and always bring a positive vibe to the team to achieve the targets even if common
efforts are failing to understand the goal. All these have a huge impact on the success of a project
in direct and indirect way. To research on the impacts of teamwork on the success of any project,
it is important to analyse how it is affecting the team and all the teammates to achieve success in
a long term path.

13THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
Recommendations:
The project manager or the leader of the project must consider the team involvement as
the crucial part for the management and delivery of the project.
The team should always be concentric towards the introduced objectives and goals
developed by the leader or the manager.
The team must be leaded by an experienced leader who is responsible for managing the
roles and responsibilities of the team members.
The delivery of the project can be measured by the contribution of every team members
made for the management and delivery of the project.

14THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
References
Banihashemi, S., Hosseini, M.R., Golizadeh, H. and Sankaran, S., 2017. Critical success factors
(CSFs) for integration of sustainability into construction project management practices in
developing countries. International Journal of Project Management, 35(6), pp.1103-1119.
Harrison, F. and Lock, D., 2017. Advanced project management: a structured approach.
Routledge.
Hussein, A., 2015. The use of triangulation in social sciences research: Can qualitative and
quantitative methods be combined?. Journal of comparative social work, 4(1).
Kerzner, H., 2018. Project management best practices: Achieving global excellence. John Wiley
& Sons.
Larson, E.W., Gray, C.F., Danlin, U., Honig, B. and Bacarini, D., 2014. Project management:
The managerial process (Vol. 6). Grandview Heights, OH: McGraw-Hill Education.
Layton, M.C. and Ostermiller, S.J., 2017. Agile project management for dummies. John Wiley &
Sons.
Lo Iacono, V., Symonds, P. and Brown, D.H., 2016. Skype as a tool for qualitative research
interviews. Sociological Research Online, 21(2), pp.1-15.
Nicholas, J.M. and Steyn, H., 2017. Project management for engineering, business and
technology. Routledge.
Oakland, J. and Marosszeky, M., 2017. Total construction management: Lean quality in
construction project delivery. Routledge.

15THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
Pal, S., Ramamurthy, A. and Mahajon, B., 2016. Arogyavardhini Vati: A theoritical
analysis. Journal of Scientific and Innovative Research, 5(6), pp.225-227.
Sohmen, V.S., 2013. Leadership and Teamwork: Two Sides of the Same Coin. Journal of
Information Technology & Economic Development, 4(2).
Turner, R., 2016. Gower handbook of project management. Routledge.
Yun, S., Choi, J., Oliveira, D.P., Mulva, S.P. and Kang, Y., 2016. Measuring project
management inputs throughout capital project delivery. International Journal of Project
Management, 34(7), pp.1167-1182.
Zulch, B., 2014. Leadership communication in project management. Procedia-Social and
Behavioral Sciences, 119, pp.172-181.

16THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS
Appendix
Gantt chart
WBS

17THE IMPACT OF TEAM WORK ON PROJECT SUCCESS