Background: Sydney was a newly hired projectmanager at a consulting firm. She has previous experience workingon project teams, but had never led a project on her own. She hasonly been with the firm for two weeks and has spent a week of thattime in onboarding. Her manager, the head of operations, has justassigned her to a rather large project. The project is to evaluatethe current processes in use within the organization specificallyfocused in two areas: new service development and clientengagement. Sydney was told to select who she needed to work on theproject and reach out to the managers of both groups to get theproject started.

The Problem: While excited about theopportunity, Sydney realized she had a few challenges ahead:

• She has had no time to establish relationships within theorganization
• She realized that it may be difficult to engage the departmentsin the initiative given the project she was asked to lead
• She was concerned about selecting team members when she did notyet know much about the others in the organization (their skillsand knowledge and expertise)
• She knew very little about the organization outside of what shelearned in the onboarding program and her research when she wasapplying for the project manager role

Sydney needed to start the project fairly soon. She didn’t havethe luxury of taking time to build relationships and get to knowpeople before the project had to begin

Question : How would the ProjectManager determine the stakeholders and the core team? What skillswould they need?