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It turned out, that most of the time there is not much choice in terms of team members. Especially in big companies the team members get selected by line management and the project manager can just accept what is provided. Very often "resource pools" are set up and people from these pools are selected. Typically those are people where the projects they participated in just ended, since companies tend to avoid any idle times for their employees. Selecting team members is a bit of a game of chance in this case. When no internal resources are available, sometimes contract workers are employed from outside. Even big companies like IBM do provide people to projects of their customers and make a business from it. Sometimes hiring new staff is necessary to get all necessary members on board, but this is in fact only a last resort. Hiring new staff most of the time is a big challenge to the time line and the milestones of the project. This is especially the case in companies, where new staff may only be hired after a contract is signed by the customer. Beside the "regular" team members, normally also people with special knowledge are needed in a project. These team members with a very specific know how normally are scarce in a company and are therefore not available full time to the project, but need to support several projects in parallel. In the end, having the right team members on board definitely makes a difference for the project.