Archive for the ‘team building’ Category

IT Managers Want To Know What Makes A Good Team?

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011
Image Credit You've Got To Look Inside To See What Makes A Team Good`

You've Got To Look Inside To See What Makes A Team Good`

In order to maximize what you will be able to accomplish as an IT manager, you are going to have to be able to build effective teams. All too often when we are faced with a new challenge, we’ll simply look around for who’s available and draft them to be on the team that we’re putting together. Is it any wonder that all too often our teams never accomplish what they set out to do?

What Are The Characteristics Of A Good Team?

If we can all agree that building a great team is a critical step in solving challenging IT problems, the next question that needs to be answered is just what makes a great IT team great? Sure, we all know that having the right people with the right set of skills is part of it, but is that all that we need?

It turns out that although that’s an important part of the solution, it’s really only one part and in fact it may not even be the most important part. What makes an IT team effective is a question on which a great deal of study has been done over the last few years. The good news is that all of the studies have reached basically the same conclusion: there are 6 key characteristics of a team that will ensure that it is successful.

These 6 characteristics are as follows:

  1. Technical Skills: every member of the team needs to bring a skill or a set of skills that will be vital to solving the problem at hand. No deadwood is permitted.

  2. A Big Goal: there needs to be one overarching goal that everyone knows that they are working towards.

  3. Commitment: each member of the team needs to have fully bought into what the team is trying to accomplish.

  4. Mutual Gain: everyone on the team needs to realize that the only way that they are going to benefit from participating in the team is by contributing to accomplishing the team’s goals.

  5. Senior Support: it takes the support of the company and especially the company’s senior management in order for a team to have a hope of being successful.

  6. Coordination: the ability to align the team’s efforts with what the rest of the company is trying to accomplish is critical so that outside resources can be leveraged in order to move the team closer to completing its goal.

The Importance Of Goals

Each of these characteristics of a successful IT team is important; however, the one key to building a successful team that can not be overlooked is ensuring that there is a single goal for the team to pursue and that everyone knows what it is.

If you don’t take the time to establish a single clear goal for your team, then the various members of your team will make up their own. This is a very natural thing for IT department employees to do. The problem with this is that they will probably all make up different goals for themselves. As they work towards these goals what will happen will be that they end up working at cross-purposes and the team is unable to move forward.

Additionally, even if a single goal is created and advertised to the team, it may not be enough. Each member of the team needs to commit themselves to the goal. By doing this and by “having some skin in the game”, they will tie their reputation and their careers to the success of the team. This ensures that they will be motivated to work towards achieving the team’s single goal.

What This All Means For You

IT managers need to have a wide variety of skills in order to be successful. Not only do they need to know how to lead an IT team, but they also need to know how to build a successful team in the first place.

It turns out that this is a problem that has been studied for a number of years. There are six key characteristics that every effective IT team needs to have. Chief among these characteristics is the need for a team to have a single goal that everyone can focus on. IT managers need to ensure that each member of the team has a commitment to achieving this goal.

It is possible to build effective team. However, as an IT manager it requires you to take the time to carefully make sure that each member of the team that you select to be on the team meets the 6 criteria. If you do this, then you’ll find yourself managing nothing but successful teams…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: What is the best way to determine what technical skills a given IT project is going to need?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When I talk with new IT managers, more often than not they tell me that their biggest challenge is getting good at hiring the right people for their teams. One of the reasons that this is so challenging is because it’s new to them. What they don’t know yet, is that hiring is only one side of the coin – retaining your staff is the other side and it turns that this can be an even bigger challenge.

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IT Managers Know When To Use A Team – And When Not To

Thursday, January 20th, 2011
Image Credit Some Problems Call For A Team, Some Don't

Some Problems Call For A Team, Some Don't

If ever there was a trendy word in the world of IT management, it would have to be the word “team”. If you read enough books or listen to enough gurus, you’d have to be forgiven for coming away with the impression that the solution to just about every IT problem is to throw a team at it. Sure teams can be useful, but IT managers need to know when they work – and when they don’t.

When Is A Team The Right Idea For An IT Manager?

Despite what you may have read, teams are not always the correct solution for every IT problem. In fact, you might not be the right kind of IT manager to be on a team.

How come teams don’t always work? A lot of this has to do with the way that a team is built. If an IT manager doesn’t (or isn’t allowed to) correctly fund, staff, and run a team, then there is very little chance that it’s going to be able to successfully accomplish its objective.

IT managers need to be careful about allowing themselves to become part of a team. How a team operates is much different from how an IT department operates. Whereas an IT manager is clearly in charge when it comes to determining what his staff does, the same can not be said about a team. In fact, an IT manager might not even be in charge of the team.

The level of collaboration that it takes to make a team work is significantly different from how day-to-day IT management is performed. IT managers need to be aware of these types of differences.

When Is A Team The Right Idea For The People On It?

Maybe before we spend any time trying to determine when a team is the right way to go about solving a problem, we should first agree on just exactly what a team is. This should be easy, right?

It turns out that everyone THINKS that they know what a team is, but we all seem to have slightly different definitions. Let’s agree that for our purposes a team is more than just a bunch of people who work together. Instead, let’s define a team as being a collection of people who bring complementary skills together to work towards achieving a common goal.

So there we go, we’ve got a good feel for what a team is. Now all we need to do is to make sure that we understand when using a team is the right decision for solving an IT problem. It turns out that there are four main categories of challenges that are well suited for being solved by teams:

  1. Different Skills Needed: problems that can only be solved by having a collection of IT workers who have a specific set of talents and skills that no one person has.

  2. Hand-Offs: problems that require IT workers to work together with a great deal of back-and-forth exchanges in order to solve the problem.

  3. Defined Deliverable: the problem must have a very clear deliverable that needs to be produced or delivered.

  4. End Date: teams shouldn’t last forever. The problem must have a “due by” date that lets everyone know exactly when the team’s task will be completed.

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

The idea of using teams to solve every IT problem that an IT manager faces can be dangerously seductive. It’s true that a lot of problems can be solved by teams, but we’ve got to realize that not every problem calls for a team.

IT managers need to take the time to first determine if creating a team that they are on is a good idea. How they manage and how they motivate the other members of the team may be very different from how they work as an IT manager. To correctly determine when a team should be used, IT managers need to be very aware of the four different types of problems that are best solved by teams.

As with any management tool, teams can be a powerful way to solve problems. However, IT managers need to first take the time to evaluate a problem and determine if it calls for a team based solution. Pick the right types of problems to apply a team to and you’ll always come out a winner!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: How big do you think an IT team can get before it becomes unmanagable?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. It’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you become an IT manager, you probably decided right there and then that you wanted to become a success. Just because you are a manager, does not guarantee that you’ll be a success – it seems to take something else, something extra. It turns out that social signals are what determines how successful an IT manager will be. Do you know what signals you are sending out?

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Alternate Reality Games: Games That IT Leaders Know How To Play

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
Alternate Reality Games Offer IT Leaders A Way To Solve Difficult Problems

Alternate Reality Games Offer IT Leaders A Way To Solve Difficult Problems

As an IT Leader, you’ve got some challenges facing you. You’re managing a diverse and potentially distributed work force of highly skilled and talented IT professionals. You need to find a way to keep them challenged, and yet at the same time enable them to find ways to work together. Have you considered Alternate Reality Games?

Leave The Real World – Visit An Alternate Reality

As IT Leaders we have been taught that most problems can be solved with the application of some math and a whole bunch of data. However, most of us have learned that the real world is much more complex than that – there are a number of IT problems that can’t be solved this way.

Jane McGonigal has been looking at big problems like this and she’s got a solution for us: Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). ARGs are immersive games that provide a massively multi-player experience. What makes them unique (outside of their size) is that the game-play unfolds in the course of their players lives over time spans that can range from days, weeks, or even months. This isn’t your father’s Wii.

Tools Of The (Alternate Reality) Trade

Ok, I can hear you saying, so just how do you play one of these ARGs? Well, it turns out that you don’t really play it – it plays you! You already probably have some hard-core gamers working on your team, so why not? The folks running the ARG show, known affectionately as “puppet masters” are in charge of distributing potentially thousands of pieces of information that contribute to telling the story of the ARG. These pieces for the puzzle can be distributed via websites set up for the game, email, cell phone text messages, online audio podcasts and videos, etc.

The players in the game don’t play by themselves – there is no way that they could solve the puzzle if they did that. Instead, they need to collaborate in order to share and gain information. They do this by using social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), wikis, chat rooms, and blogs to talk about what clues they have and what they might mean. This interaction forms the narrative of the game.

Sounds Like An Effort – Why Bother?

Welcome to the 21st Century. McGonigal points out that ARGs are an excellent way for IT teams to master those difficult collaboration skills that IT Leaders want them to learn. Two of the skills that she points out are cooperation radar – the ability to identify who can best help you, and protovation - the ability to prototype and test solutions quickly.

Oh, and by the way: ARGs are a lot of fun for everyone that is involved. Although they may be working through a simulation of a business problem that your firm is facing, it doesn’t seem that way – it feels like a game.

Final Thoughts

When an IT Leader is faced with a BIG challenge that doesn’t have an obvious solution, playing an ARG may be just what the CIO ordered. Although they are not easy to set up, an ARG may offer the best way to quickly test out different scenarios in real world circumstances.

Above and beyond the business benefits that ARGs offer, using this innovative way to stimulate and engage your team will provide you with yet another way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

Questions For You

Have you ever used any form of game playing to help your teams sort through difficult IT problems? Do any of your team members play massive online games like “World Of Warcraft”? Would your business environment support part of the IT department playing a game to solve a business problem? Do you think that your IT team gets along well enough to work together in order to solve a complex puzzle? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Oh Web 2.0, it seems like only yesterday that you arrived – is it possible that already you may be getting ready to be replaced? The answer is not quite yet, but the outline of what the Web 3.0 is going to look like is starting to firm up. IT Leaders need to start getting ready for this change now so that when it arrives they can take advantage of all that it will offer…

For More Information

  • Check out the “World Without Oil” simulation that used an ARG to simulate a complex problem with no easy solutions.

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Retention, Retention, Retention

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

How To Retain IT Staff
So you’ve finally built a great IT team / department and now you can’t sleep at night because you are worried that everyone is going to leave. Well guess what, you’re probably right — everyone will eventually leave; however, how fast they leave depends on you. The IT field has a rich history of job hopping and even in today’s lean times, this has not changes. Unfortunately it’s your most valuable employees that will be most likely to hop because they have the talents & experience that your competition is looking for. What’s an IT manager / HR manager / CIO to do?

IT workers are a unique breed. If they like what they are doing, they will stay. One of the first ways to ensure that this happens is to make sure that everyone’s connected with the mission of the business. Note that this is easy to say, but can be very hard to do. The larger the firm, the more disconnected most workers feel. Please keep in mind that the mission of the business can never have anything to do with money (i.e. “Grow profits by 20%”) because unless you work in accounting, you can never get excited about that.

Next is to make sure that IT management is open with the staff about business wins, losses, and hiring plans. When was the last time that you sat down with your staff and talked about where the company is going? For that matter, do you even know where the company is headed? If everyone feels as though they know what is going on, then they will better understand how their job is helping the company get there. Once again, please note that saying that you have an “open door” policy is really just so many words. Your actions will speak much louder than these words.

Promoting from within can be a key tool for getting folks to stick around. If everyone knows what a career path looks like at your company, then they will know where they stand and what their chances of moving up are. If you are constantly hiring from the outside to fill upper management positions, then the team will lose heart and move on.

Finally, be very careful when it comes to team building activities. IT staff are notorious for not wanting to participate in these events and if you are not careful, it could turn into something that looks like a scene from “The Office” TV Show . Instead, creating a challenge that requires a team to work together in order to win a prize or reward that has visibility (big trophy displayed in the office) or has a clear social value (donation to a charity in their names) can make a lasting impression.

One of the things that makes an IT so valuable is its creativity (“innovation” in modern speak). If you use this same creativity to actively work to create an environment in which the IT staff wants to keep working and looks forward to what comes next, then congratulations — you’ve succeeded.

Posted in company mission, IT staff retention, open, promotions, team building | 1 Comment »