It's not the plan, it's the process of planning

This paper argues that team building, the development of shared goals and visions, knowledge sharing and team cognition, trust, and relational norms have a significant impact on project success. However, team building in general is given only cursory discussion in the normative literature on project management. In comparison, project planning has also been linked to project success, and is given a preeminent place in project management practice guides. This paper discusses the contribution that team building makes to planning, before questioning whether some of the influence that planning has been found to have on success should have been attributed to team building instead. The paper then calls for an increased balance in the project management literature, to account for the impact that team building has on successful project implementation.