Your Team's Core Members
At the center of your team are core members, those who were involved in initiating the project and laying out the parameters. Some of these are stakeholders, who will move into active roles in the project. The degree to which initial stakeholders and sponsors get involved in the actual project may vary greatly. Team members will become stakeholders as this becomes their project. Sponsors are very often not involved unless it's their own project — they're paying everyone involved, and they want to do a lot of the work themselves.
There are various levels of involvement by the sponsor. Someone may begin a project by handing you instructions and a budget and saying, “I'll be back in six months, good luck.” You may sit down with upper management and find that although you are project leader, many of the other managers who worked with you in getting this project off the ground are planning to stay involved in various capacities.
With more and more people working off-site via technology and the Internet, there are projects in which the team members never meet. Even in these circumstances, communication is vital, and team members usually establish an e-mail relationship with one another.
Sometimes core project team members are found and sometimes they are already attached to the project. The team that works to plan the project is generally a core team, a starting team designed to get things lined up and set goals, objectives, and parameters. Some will continue on to the actual project team, while others won't.
