An approach to creating high-performing teams

Market demands have changed a lot in recent times compared to what they were a few decades ago. With the increased number of options, the customer has today, and the market that is fulfilling the demands with equally fast response time, the pressure on the product companies is to respond quickly to market changes as well as to bring products early to market. This has led to disruption in the organizations to adopt new ways of working to remain competitive. This blog explains the approach that we have taken to help a lot of companies in becoming high-performing organisations.

Approach – Top Down and Bottom Up

For an organisation to be high-performing, effective, and yield intended results, it is important to be aligned to the main objectives for which we are undertaking a change in the ways of working. To ensure success, the alignment of goals at all levels from the org level goals to the leadership to the programs and to the teams must be firmly established. It is important for an organisation to know why this change is necessary. To achieve the intended goals, the change must happen from two ends, top-down and bottom-up. Very often, we see the change initiated at team levels with limited success.

Driving Change – Stages

We have driven change in four stages –

1. Discover stage – here, we try and understand the Organisation/program landscape.
2. Baseline and Set Goals stage – here, we try to see the historical data if available, and see what the final goals should be.
3. Create a roadmap – here, we create a roadmap with a phased approach.
4. Execute & improve – here, we meticulously work on the execution as per the roadmap while continuously seeking feedback and making changes to our actions thereby course-correcting to achieve the objectives.

The following section talks about the stages to achieve the same in some detail.

Discover

In this stage, we meet various stakeholders involved in the process of change and understand their pain points and what they are looking to achieve by this exercise. One-on-one interviews with stakeholders at all levels are important to correctly assess the current state. It is important to include customer participation in all major decisions and hence it is in this phase we set up a change management team/ office along with key customer members. We run our tool-based assessments to derive insights. We will have a concrete problem statement framed at the end of this phase.

Baseline and Set Goals

In this stage, we will set baseline metrics and set our goals. We must adhere to the philosophy of “measure what matters” based on the problem statement identified in the Discover phase. We use the historical data and translate the data to the chosen set of metrics which will be our baseline before we begin our journey. Based on what we want to achieve, finalize the goals and the metrics that we would like to see at the end of our journey. Here is where we get all our aligned goals and Objectives and Key Results (OKR) identified. We will also create a backlog of actions that we need in the execution phase. We will have to maintain and update the backlog of actions sometimes here on.

Create Roadmap

In this stage, we identify the agile framework we will adopt and create a roadmap based on the phased approach. We follow the philosophy ‘to not boil the ocean’. Hence, the roadmap we create we factor in the separate phases and the results we plan to achieve in each phase. We also identify the pilot programs that are early adapters to the new ways of working. Our roadmap will lay out how changes will be transferred to the people, processes, and tools. People adaption will include all the training plans and 1-1 coaching plans. Process adoption will detail how the new process change will take effect based on the agile framework chosen. Tools adaption will cover all tooling aspects including configuration of the tools for the teams participating in the journey. We will update the backlog of actions, as necessary.

Execute and Improve

This stage is by far the longest-lasting phase in the change adaptation program. This will be divided into phases as per our roadmap. We prioritise our backlog of actions and start executing it in a time-boxed cadence like the manner scrum is executed. While keeping in mind the goals for each phase, we keep making observations and updating our backlog of actions. It is important to take regular feedback from the stakeholders and appropriately update and prioritise the backlog of actions. The ‘inspect and adapt’ principle applies aptly here as this is crucial to ensure we are on target to meet the objectives.

Conclusion

While we ask our programs to adopt an agile methodology, is it not prudent that we adapt to the agile methodology ourselves while driving the change? This blog is an attempt to bring in elements of agile in our change adoption process itself, by bringing in the ‘backlog of actions’ and ‘inspect and adopt’ and measuring key success factors.