Improving the capabilities of project team management using the Gestalt cycle of experience’

Tools that project managers use while managing project teams are insufficient. This probably contributing to the large number of projects that fail to achieve their objectives within the desired time and budget to the full satisfication of the customer. An inovative approach for the identification of the main reasons for these failures and the ways to prevent them are described in this paper. The paper introduces several solutions for project team building and management, based on an interdisciplinary approach and theory known in the Gestalt cycle of experience. In spite of their differences, the humanistic process of need fulfillment and the project management approach have a lot in common. The present paper demonstrates that both team decision making and project management methods use similar processes. Hence, applying the well known mental barriers and solutions from the Gestalt cycle of experience may reduce the currently high percentage of project failures. The paper finally introduces several areas in which project managers can focus on when dealing with managing a project team.