You're working with diverse energy engineering teams. How do you juggle conflicting priorities effectively?

To juggle conflicting priorities with diverse energy engineering teams, I would: 1. Assess urgency and impact, prioritizing tasks based on their criticality and alignment with strategic goals. 2. Foster open communication to encourage transparent discussions and understand the different priorities and perspectives of each team. 3. Set clear expectations by establishing common goals and deadlines to align teams and minimize conflicts. 4. Delegate appropriately, assigning tasks based on team strengths while ensuring balance in workloads. 5. Be flexible and adaptable, adjusting plans as needed to accommodate changing priorities while maintaining focus on the overall objectives.

Engineering teams come in different number sizes and experience compositions. Roles and responsibilities of individuals are fluid in nature and varying in scope depending upon the development stage of the project and lifecycle stage of the team. ?There are two common components to every role. 1. Believe from the core that output of the team is a collaborative production, and we need to help each other for elevating it. 2. Query every activity or proposal from various angles with the lens of curiosity and still trust the intent of everyone on the team. Maturity and exemplary behavior of the key personnel on the team sets the tone for rest of the pack to follow.

Prioritization would be based upon the critical path as shown by my schedule developed with input and “buy-in” from those involved with the ultimate authority being the PM.

SMART is a really good framework to follow for goal setting. 'Specific' is the most important one, because it dictates the direction of movement for individuals and the team. 'Measuring' makes sure that we achieve the 'specific' goal with predictability of time and resources. Few years ago, I was tasked to help a large org to adopt automation testing framework. We implemented sophisticated solutions, but did not see much adoption. I kept improving the offering. At some point, preparing tutorials and documentation for the framework & setup did the trick. I could have never imagined that documentation for simple tool would make such a difference for an engineering team. The real driver remained the specific goal of automation enablement.

For engineering teams, over-communication isn't an issue. When in doubt, communicate your objective, plan, measuring mechanisms and most of the time - some or other person would provide an opinion or direction. You can apply some filter to pick and choose, how & what of next steps from that pile of opinions/ directions as well. Idea generation is toughest of tasks, it can only be solved by communicating openly with wide set of people. When you share more, people psychologically feel the need to help. I have experienced this phenomenon even more strongly with engineering teams.

There are 2 common causes of conflict a. Divergent opinions on direction of a project b. Sense of being treated unfairly Over the years, I have used a mechanism or a version of it to resolve conflicts on my teams. I would ask the opposing parties to come up with scenarios in which they would support each other's version and do a pitch. I would give them some time to prep. Usually, when they come back to have the reverse conversation, they understand each other better - they visualize the solution differently and come prepared to find middle grounds. When two parties agree to find middle ground - they do find it and that resolves the conflicts. When others on team, see this into action - it recharges them, elevates the energy of the team.