In this
article, I’ll explore some of the basic elements of what is needed in a team to
allow stable, repeatable output from remote working. I’ll look at processes, templates and tools with a view on how these topics can come together to bring alignment to a team. Lastly we'll take a brief look at how these are foundational elements for a team's Service offerings.
In the
modern workplace, we are all working from remote locations, on remote projects
or opportunities, into remote customers or other teams. With all this distance
between colleagues in the same team, other teams they collaborate with and customers,
how do you ensure that what your teams are doing is adhering to an identified,
agreed, standard process, and that what they are delivering is consistent
across the team?
Remote
working isn’t a new practice, but after the recent long period of enforced
remote working we’ve all been through, ensuring a consistent output from each
member of a team is harder than it’s ever been before. Adding to that, people
have overcome their reluctance to change roles and are moving from employer to
employer again, so having a strong foundation for the existing teams is vital,
but how do you expect to successfully onboard new team members if you can’t
easily show them how to integrate into your operating model?
Why design
for consistent deliverable output?
Team Goals: Teams deliver activities aligned to a specific set of goals. Everyone in the team should be aware of those goals, to ensure that they are all pointing in the same direction. Think of your current role within a team, chances are you know exactly what your team goals are, and what your managements goals are.
Team Services:
Most teams deliver a specific set of services that they have agreed on, that
they will promote to other teams, to create awareness of how to work with them,
and what their value as a team is, and how they can use those services to achieve
the goals mentioned above.
When your
team is called in to collaborate with other teams on a larger task, as an
individual piece of a puzzle, across a larger picture, its important that they
can deliver the right size and shape piece, otherwise the picture is incomplete.
Roles come with expectations of outputs, for example, a Business Analyst
delivers Use Cases and Requirements, a Software Developer codes and builds
software solutions. The ‘What’ defines the ‘who’. Give someone a job title, can
they be considered to be performing that role, unless they deliver what is
expected of that role?
To bring these
elements together, each team has a role to perform in concert with other teams,
so it is important that each of them delivers output that is reliably standard,
within the boundaries and expectations that everyone understands and agrees on.
Let’s define
this as a business principle:
“Regardless
of which individual within the team is performing the task, the output
delivered to the wider organization should be of the same format and standard.”
Now take
that principle and apply it to your existing team. Is this true? Next apply it
to newly onboarded members of the team, onboarded during enforced remote
working, and you’ve got an even harder task.
Processes
Let’s start
with the backbone of aligning several individuals together into a coherent team.
The only way you are going to get everyone in a team pointing in the same
direction is through clearly identified, agreed upon processes. Those two words
are key here. People must be aware of the processes and must have agreed to
them.
Do you have
a process library in your organization? Are you aware of where it is? How are
the processes that your team follow governed? The method a team uses to performs
its tasks are constantly under scrutiny and review, but resulting changes need
to be controlled. This is information everyone in the team should be aware of.
Templates
Teams create
things, such as messages to specific audiences, reports, reviews, and other insights.
How they deliver these things, the ‘outputs’ should be clearly defined within
the team as standard templates. A template driven approach drives efficiency,
no one is starting from scratch, and takes away a lot of the early decision
making in the creation process. Create templates in standard formats, with an
agreed structure within the template, so each team member is more ‘painting by
numbers’ than starting from a blank canvas.
This
approach ensures that more experienced members of the team can help lift less
experienced members by guiding them via a framework, within the template. If
you start from scratch, topics can be missed, based on experience or viewpoint.
Tools
We’ve got a
way of working, a method, and we’ve got a standard set of templates to
delivery. Next, ideally, we’d have a standard set of tools to support this. By
tools I’m factoring in solutions to support our methodology, solutions to host and
manage templates, solutions for presenting and sharing outputs etc.
Often this
space can swing wildly from “We have no solutions to help us do this” to the
other end of the spectrum “We have five solutions for performing video calls”.
Each brings its own problems, for example, not having something in place
creates an obvious barrier to success but having too many solutions leads to
fragmentation and confusion when everyone is using different solutions due to
personal preference.
As a
minimum you should have a platform for hosting, finding and sharing outputs.
Ideally with a governance or versioning capability built in. There are whole
articles on Architecture principles for managing applications in your organization,
but one of the key principles is, ‘only have one of anything’ – it keeps things
simple and avoids confusion and complexity.
In
Conclusion
Lastly, look
at how you wrap all the above topics into a standard set of services. How do
you bring the method, the templates and the solutions together to drive a
standard set of services offerings across the team? What do those services offerings look
like? How do you showcase them, both within the team and externally? Well, that’s
a topic for another article!