Clarity in goals and execution — Key to Team Success
In my last post, “Two Must-Haves for Teams to be Successful”, I said that mission (or purpose) and a team that feels and is supported are the two key things a team needs. One without the other will lead to a team struggling. A team may have a clear purpose and set of goals, know where it is, but if it doesn’t feel supported it will not be as effective as one that is supported. Similarly, a team that is and feels supported but does not have a clear purpose and goals will wander aimlessly, doing whatever they feel is most important at any point in time.
In this article I want to discuss how goals and their execution can be made clear. I will focus on projects, but smaller (and larger) efforts will also see similar issues and will benefit from this discussion.
Project Initiation
In my experience, the most difficult time is when a leader and their team is handed an assignment, at project initiation time. While it may be clear in the requestor’s mind what the outcome should be, this is not necessarily the case for the team. By its nature, the team needs to dig deeper into the request, which will lead to numerous questions that need to be addressed to be able to successfully plan and execute the initiative. And there may be other stakeholders who have other ideas as to what the outcome should be.
What should you, as a leader, and your team, do? There’s a “standard” document called the project charter (an Internet search will yield numerous examples) that can be helpful. It addresses, at a minimum, what are the project objectives (outcomes), scope, and project responsibilities. It should also indicate a desired timeline, an estimate of resources needed, anticipated risks, and a list of key stakeholders.
Conceptually, this document would need to be generated by the requestor of the effort and handed to the leader. In practice, it rarely works this way. So, if there’s such a document, it’s a great start for you and team to understand the request and ask questions before starting any planning.
If there’s no such a document, you and team need to generate it. This generation effort will identify numerous questions and areas that need further research. For example, at one time I was asked to put together a project to build a system to receive and fulfill requests for IT services and products. As I started digging into the request (no, I did not get a project charter), I identified two additional projects doing the same thing! This can happen in organizations that do not have a well-organized portfolio management system to handle requests. This lack is very common, so identifying similar efforts should be one of the questions that the leader and team should answer.
At the same time, stakeholders need to be identified and engaged to determine their needs and desires. Don’t be surprised, actually expect it, that their requirements are different from those of the originator. Capturing these requirements and differences will then allow the leader and team to work with all stakeholders to reach agreement on the expected outcomes. If this is not done early on, expect disappointment and complaints when you finally deliver the product or service.
Address needed resources and time. Is the effort funded to the level you and the team think will be necessary to deliver in the expected timeline.
Lastly, but probably should be first, is the requestor authorized to launch the project? Do they have the resources to allocate and the authority to launch it? This may sound odd, but I’ve been in situations where even projects blessed by the CIO did not have the funds necessary as the CIO was overextending their commitments.
Project Planning
As the project charter gets firmed up (do not need to wait until it is blessed as some early planning will help in the charter effort), you should start planning the effort. Start with:
- Desired outcome
- Any intermediate outcomes
- Desired timeline
Then follow your favorite project planning process. If your organization has templates that are relevant to your effort, don’t hesitate to use one of them. My preference is Map Days, the planning portion of Commitment-Based Project Management (CBPM). See my article “Planning with Map Days”. It engages most of the team in the planning effort, leveraging the group’s knowledge. It becomes “their” plan and not “your” plan. They will be more committed to delivering to a date they’ve developed and to one that was dictated to them.
CBPM also identifies dependencies between team members (or other teams if you have multiple teams) that may be missed otherwise until they are needed. It also reinforces the need for team members to discuss their expectations of the various deliverables they expect. That is, their quality (which means meeting customer requirements. Philip Crosby, in Quality is Free, made the case. See the Wikipedia article).
Don’t expect a final plan regardless of how you plan the effort. First, visibility is limited in your and the team’s understanding of what the effort will entail as well obstacles you may face. Second, unless you are building the nth version of the product (which is really not project management but manufacturing), you and the team won’t know enough to determine all the steps. Third, issues will surface. Someone will go on vacation or a higher priority effort comes the team’s way and there will be a need to re-plan. Do not ignore these situations! Bad news (late projects) only get worse with time.
Project Execution
Finally, let the team members do their work. You don’t need to know all the details. They were hired because they are smart and know what they are doing. You don’t add (much) value by knowing everything. On the contrary, you become a bottleneck. Instead, trust them. Monitor the plan at the deliverables level. That is, monitor the output of each team and team member to ensure outputs are not missed.
No plan is perfect but there’s no substitute for planning. Once you have a plan, start monitoring it. But do it so that it is visible to all and that it helps the team in its effort. Only monitor those things that need monitoring, i.e., the deliverables between teams/team members.
A deliverable is either done or not done. 95% done is not done. This will cause some tension as persons like to be recognized for their efforts. However, tracking the % complete creates noise and waste. If the item cannot be turned over to the customer, then it is not done. Could a 95% completed item be turned over to a customer? If so, then the definition of the deliverable needs to be revisited. A 95% item should be an early version of the product, call it a draft of a document or version 0.9 of software. Then a second deliverable should be defined at the 100% level.
Make sure that everyone knows where the team is with respect to the project. Using CBPM, the spreadsheet is available to all but you should check multiple times per week on status. This check is not for your benefit as much as for the benefit of the responsible team member’s to know what was coming up. Yes, they have access to the spreadsheet but with their heads down doing the detail work, it is helpful to get a reminder.
The spreadsheet we use indicates what’s coming up, what’s done, late, or missing a date. Check on the status of these items.
While conceptually deliverable items should have commit dates, this is not always possible when the plan is first developed. As part of the review and re-plan effort, you should try to get as many commit dates as possible. Without a date for an item there’s no commitment on the part of the owner. And your project will not succeed. Each deliverable needs to have a commit date then its execution measured against this date.
Conclusion
Clear goals and status are key to a successful team. Whether you use CBPM or some other approach, make sure that you, as the leader, work with the team to get a good plan that all team members agree to.
And don’t forget to support your team, the second must-have of a successful team!
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Contact me at jose@coachsolera.com to find out how to improve your leadership.
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