whole teams
Team-based performance is key, but only works with team input
Tammy Erickson’s recent blog post in the Harvard Business Review on Rethinking Performance Assessment is a spot-on article. She focuses on the value of team-based reward systems and how such systems only work if team feedback is part of the process. The article points out research suggesting that simply moving to a team-based reward system is an insufficient [...]
Tackling the global project problem, part 2
Launching a global project presents many problems that are completely foreign to most project leaders and managers. Last month I pointed out that we have to deal with a lot more than language barriers with global projects. For example, in some cultures, speaking openly is not to be expected, in any setting. For this second installment, I thought I’d share a few concrete ideas for tackling some of these issues, things that can make a real difference and that are easy to put into play. To keep on a theme, I’ll focus on strategies to tackle the common, core issue raised in last month’s article: communication and execution problems. One of the first things I generally want to take a close look at are the techniques and processes used to manage a project. Most of the time, they are not adequate for one reason: They weren’t designed to support a global, multi-cultural organization.
Tackling the global project problem
Launching a global project presents many problems that are completely foreign to most project leaders and managers. Understanding the cultural differences, communication differences, and interpersonal relations of a global team is only the beginning. Business environment, local regulatory and compliance issues, and international laws scratch a bit deeper, but managing a global project is more complicated than most project managers anticipate.
Managing risk in global projects
One of the most significant risks we identify is a globally disparate (geographically separated) team. Teams working in separate regions face tremendous challenges that a co-located team doesn’t have to think about, a situation made worse when outsourcing, where conflicts in language, time, culture, and business environment all affect the organization.
When there’s a freeloader on your team
According to extensive research The Gallup Organization (Washington D.C.) and Harvard Business Review have conducted over the past decade, few factors are as corrosive to employee engagement as a colleague who skates through the workweek taking advantage of the much harder work of others. What’s the cost of disengagement? Much more than any manager wants [...]
Fix your boss (or, reduce risk to quality using a matrix approach)
How do you ensure that one person doesn’t derail your entire project? Most of us have been there before. Maybe it’s a co-worker who doesn’t work well with the team. Maybe it’s your boss, who has to oversee every single decision even though he’s an overtasked bottleneck. Either problem poses a critical risk to your project: Delays, mistakes and rework because one person isn’t part of a streamlined effort. Learn how the situation can be improved, realizing positive gains in this habitually entrenched process.
Whole teams
An operational, successful team is more than a set of interchangeable, anonymized skill sets. Would you buy a car that had never been tested in a safety lab? Of course not, and yet the software industry, particularly the commercial industry (as compared to Military, for example) has been ploughing along without whole teams for decades–a trend that seems to be getting more and more negative attention.
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