Technique for Building Project Teams Based on the Belbin Role Model

This article presents a technique for building teams capable of successfully implementing project activities. Usually, when project teams are to be built, only the functional component is taken into account, i.e. team members must have the professional knowledge and skills necessary to create a specific product. Experience shows that this does not guarantee success. On the other hand, there are different techniques for determining the individual characteristics of people, but they are, as a rule, confined to the theory and practice of management, and are aimed at building teams of specialists with a certain profile without taking into account differences in professional competencies. A distinctive feature of the proposed methodology is the combination of considered professional competencies and skills defined as specializations and the individual psychological characteristics of potential team members. At the same time it is proposed to determine these individual characteristics on the basis of Belbin role model because this model is focused on the successful implementation of projects. The developed application using the data about candidates generates all possible teams. For each team a role diversity indicator is estimated in accordance with the Belbin model, this indicator is considered to be the assessment of the potential effectiveness of the team. As a result, the team for which this indicator has the maximum value is recommended to run the project. The presence of a participant with leadership qualities is also an important success factor, so the application checks and prints a diagnosis about whether there is a candidate with this role in the built team. An application that automates this technique provides an additional opportunity to view data about team members and delivers the ability to edit its composition. The technique can be applied both in companies where there is a possibility of choosing from several employees with similar specialization, and also in the educational process where project team work becomes one of the main forms of students educational activities, and where different team compositions are possible as well. It was successfully tested in one of the IT companies in the Ural region, and also proved its promise in the educational teams building in the Department of Information Technologies and Automation and at the Department of Radio Electronics and Telecommunications, Institute of radioelectronics and information technologies, Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin.

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