How To Become a Dysfunctional Team... or Not

Back in 2008 Tom Edison put this Project Team Performance Curve on paper as an expansion to Tuckman's Forming, Storming, Norming, Perfoming model. Edison describes five additional stages that characterize a tipping point, a trans-formative opportunity and the dysfunctional road some teams take to extinction.

Informing
At the pinnacle of a team's success Edison suggests a team is at its informing stage where they should be sharing their experiences, both successes and failures, with the larger organization.  This helps to keep a free flow of ideas, experiences and potentially prompting brainstorming's piggybacking.

Conforming
Next the team moves into a mental state rampant with Group Think, fewer fresh perspectives and innovative ideas. This is what is referred to colloquially as the doldrums or what I like to call the mental state of boredom where you are so busy doing nothing you want to slam your face into the keyboard just to change things up for a few seconds.

Transforming
This is where team transformation happens if dysfunction is identified soon enough. The team's leadership needs to inject a fresh perspective and its associated new innovation into the team.  They can do so on their own by leveraging external resources such as another team in its informing stage or perhaps an outside facilitator like the trusted experts at Thought Ensemble. Come on, you had to see that coming.

I'll leave it to Edison to talk about the other dysfunctional stages and melding of face and keyboard, but needless to say it's bad and you don't want to go down that road. However, the task left to you is figuring out where your team is in Tuckman and Edison's team development life cycle. I challenge you to be honest with yourself and your colleagues and get the help you may need to transform your team before it's too late.

References:
Edison T. The Team Development Life Cycle: A New Look. In: Defense AT&L.

Wondering Where You Stand Financially

The following is a sample view into someone's full portfolio.  Call me if your interested to know how you can get the same level of visibility.

My Myers-Briggs Type

Recently I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test and it deemed me an ISTJ, which stands for Introversion, Sensing, Thinking, Judging.

Stifling Innovation With PMO Process

Often times project management organizations that roll out new governance processes inadvertently stifle innovation. They have many good intentions such as providing more visibility into corporate initiatives and better management of spending, but don't necessarily consider the ramifications.

Often times the process begins with ideas which if approved get converted to projects and executed on.  Seems perfectly logical and flexible right? Well as usual the devil is in the details. Once you start to process flow the lower level of detailed steps and what roles are conducting each you begin asking crucial questions. Who can create an idea? What information is needed to create an idea? Who approves ideas? These questions' answers can absolutely destroy a company, seriously!

Switch sides of the table.

You just had a brilliant idea that could make a lot of money for the company, but now what? Well, in the past you would just talk to a couple of people, revise a little and then get started. Now, you have to create an idea, but of course you don't have permission to do so. Instead, your director has to be the person to create it, which means you should probably put a well articulated email or deck together explaining your idea. Once you are prepared and can get some of their time,  you pitch it and all goes well. However, your director needs some key information like short and long term investments, timing, risks, return and it's alignment to the corporate strategy in order to create the new idea. If you make it this far without giving up already, your one of the few. 

Okay, switch back.

Most people and their ideas would have died long ago in your new process. That or they realized their idea was so great they could quit, start their own company,  immediately execute on the idea and ultimately put you out of business.

Those initial questions of who can create an idea, how and what's needed are really important because inherently they lead you to inhibiting the flow of ideas with your well-intended processes. One simple alternative could be anyone with an idea can reach out to your product evangelist team, which would shepherd the idea through the process giving it the momentum it needs or quickly killing it before wasting anyone's time.

An Operations Perspective

If you are in an IT delivery organization you may occasionally wonder why the operations side of the house is hesitant or resistant to introducing your changes into their production environment. Well, allow me to help you visualize this common problem.

Initially when you first worked together operations saw your application as a giant marble stallion rearing up on its hein legs ready to trample everything beneath it. However; over time, for whatever reason, their perspective changed to see a Trojan horse that more often than not bursts into flames, morphs into a flaming fire dragon and then burns their tranquil little shanty to the ground. And to make matters worse they get blamed for it and are then expected to rebuild everyone's shanties. Then on the horizon they see yet another Trojan fire dragon headed for their recently rebuilt shanty.