Organizational Metrics
Part of The PIRATE Way — Stories about scaling up engineering teams.
Understanding Tuckman’s Stages and the FSNP Model
First introduced in 1965 by Bruce Tuckman, the forming–storming–norming–performing (FSNP) model of group development offers a framework to comprehend the progressive evolution of team dynamics. These sequential stages represent a team's phases as they confront challenges, innovate solutions, and achieve outcomes.
These stages can be summarized as:
- Forming: This initial phase is marked by unfamiliarity. New team members often grapple with alignment and direction.
- Storming: At this juncture, diverse opinions surface, potentially leading to conflicts. Yet, such confrontations can be advantageous, cultivating trust and facilitating a unified team approach.
- Norming: Here, teams coalesce, aligning seamlessly with the overarching goal while appreciating individual contributions.
- Performing: By this stage, teams operate in harmony, bolstered by mutual respect and a shared vision. Such teams are autonomous and consistently achieve their set targets.
Recognizing the repercussions of structural alterations on team dynamics and performance outcomes is crucial. Educating teams about these stages equips them to manage conflicts better, especially since structural changes can necessitate revisiting earlier stages.
Navigating the Allocation Process
The frequent team reconfigurations — be it due to departures, new inductions, or the quarterly OKR process — necessitate periodic resource reallocation to mirror business imperatives.
Concurrently, this reshuffling also presents opportunities to address individual career aspirations. Effective harmonization requires consideration of the following:
- Prevailing business goals and financial boundaries
- The spread of skills and expertise across teams
- The current phase of team development (forming, storming, norming, or performing)
- Personalized growth objectives, encompassing domain exploration or assuming novel roles
- Miscellaneous factors, such as conflict management.
Concluding the allocation phase with a feedback loop is imperative. It empowers team members to voice their opinions on reassignments and transitions, supplementing quantitative metrics with invaluable qualitative insights.
Monitoring with Metrics
Gaining a comprehensive perspective on team stability, especially within fluid, high-growth contexts mandates diligent monitoring. An informative dashboard might feature:
- Seniority Distribution: A delineation by proficiency tiers (e.g., Entry, Mid, Senior) within individual teams.
- Company Tenure: The median span of members’ engagement with the enterprise.
- Career Experience: A breakdown of the aggregate professional tenure of team members.
- Team Affiliation Duration: The median period members have been affiliated with their present teams.
For a more nuanced understanding, if data is accessible:
- Domain Experience: Median tenure reflecting domain-specific expertise, inclusive of experiences prior to their tenure with the company (areas like payments, bookings, identity management, and more).
- Technology Stack Experience: Median span members have engaged with particular technological tools or platforms.
Remember: This is a blog post from the series “The PIRATE Way”.
