The Right Structure to Support Success
In the previous edition of WWW we looked at how to pick the right people for your project team. However, the group of individuals need an enabling environment to achieve their objectives. This is where organisational structure enters the picture.
Establish Centres of Excellence
Even though you want to have generalising specialists on your project team, you still need some means of providing coaching and training for specific skill sets. Depending on the size of the organisation you may also want to develop organisational standards. Centres of Excellence provide a focused collection of knowledge on a particular skill set. These may be the organisational units or departments to which people are assigned for HR purposes. The trick to remember is to not allow these units to degrade into a collection of specialists.
Build teams around a specific product or system
For HR purposes people report to a resource manager providing guidance on a specific skill set, but for everyday work they are organised into teams that are focused on a particular product or system. This style of organisation has two main advantages:
- It keeps a team together for an extended period of time, which allows them to reach gelling status; and
- It allows the members of the team to focus on a specific subject area.
Keep the passion alive
The problem with having product-focused teams is that the team could get to the point where they run out of challenges and start to lose interest in what they are doing. There are a couple of ways to tackle this:
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If you have a well gelled team that has gotten the product to a completed state, move the entire team onto some other project. This provides the team with new challenges while at the same time giving the new project a head start by placing it in the hands of a well performing team from the beginning.
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Provide the team with the opportunity to learn new skills while working on the same project will keep the passion alive while increasing the number of generalising specialists in the company.
Don't be afraid to change seats on the bus
In Good to Great Jim Collin describes great companies as those that are willing to make sure they have the right people on the bus (or off the bus in some cases) and in the right seat on the bus.
In the process of forming your gelling teams, you are bound to find cases where you have someone that you want in your organisation, but they may not necessarily on the right project - they are on the right bus, but not in the right seat. In other cases you will find people that frankly are not on the right bus. In those cases, you should get them off that bus as soon as possible otherwise they will impact the performance of the team. If the rest of the team is truly performing well, they may very well help the team member off the bus themselves.
Information courtesy of Kent McDonald
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