Three Steps to Building Effective and Collaborative Digital Teams.

Introduction and overview

Below we look at how to integrate three management approaches 1 -Onboarding, 2 - T-shaped teams, 3 - Agility (follow the links to the full articles) to create more collaborative and effective digital teams. We demonstrate how these approaches are synergistic with each other and how they can be activated and reinforced by the Opquast multidisciplinary web training.

Part 1– Onboarding

Onboarding

Amidst the revolution of home-working it is essential to be able to build reciprocal trust between employer and employee. Organisations need to establish cultures which support, motivate, and empower their teams and onboarding is the crucial first step to set in motion those objectives.

"a formal onboarding program could see?50% greater employee retention?among new recruits and 62% greater productivity"[1]

Without a robust framework, employee retention and engagement will dramatically decrease; a number of simple and adaptable frameworks exist. One example is the HR foundation SHRM’s 4 C’s model [3].?SHRM presents four levels: Compliance, moving through Clarification, to Culture and Connection (shown below).

Culture and Connection with Opquast

If training programs can also bring elements which inspire collaboration within the workplace then employees will benefit from an increased sense of shared goals which will be compounded if the work includes purpose-driven missions. Opquast’s central raison d'être is ethical web design. The Opquast certification brings teams together to better collaborate on web and digital products which have better inclusive design, privacy. security and user trust.

Other goals of Opquast training which help reinforce a positive culture are: empowering staff as quality custodians, increasing collaboration via cross-disciplinarity, and customer orientation and empathy ( including employee experiences). All of these connected objectives support the Culture and Connection upper levels of the SHRM model above.

Compliance and Clarification

The Opquast web quality assurance approach addresses the key risks and concerns that affect website and digital application users, focusing on universal design and the key web and I.T. compliance challenges.

For all employees with digital activities compliance is an increasingly common responsibility. Employees need to be aware they can become part of the solution for catching I.T. compliance breaches extending their value and bringing meaning to their roles by improving the effectiveness of such social digital missions as eco-design, security, privacy and accessibility.

Opquast’s Onboarding Solution (2.5-hour training - online on-demand)

Opquasts certification is a cross-disciplinary approach focused on reinforcing collaborative and customer-centric digital teams which produces higher-quality web and digital products. The training demonstrates how the wide array of digital facing professionals can work together using a multidisciplinary knowledge and vocabulary which builds understanding and helps break any silo mentality between employees.

The full certification program is a 14-20 hour online training (+ study time). It benefits all employees that touch digital and web aspects.

As it is not always possible for all employees to carry out a 14-20 hour+ course when they start a new job, the shorter onboarding version teaches a basic digital literacy and technical vocabulary in 2.5 hours. All digital roles will likely benefit from the full course but to seed the important cultural norms of the training the shorter onboarding solution can be used to great effect to reinforce digital culture and gain, at scale, some of the objectives highlighted above (figure 3).

Part 2.1 – T-shaping, How and Why

Opquast is essentially a T-shaped approach to training digital teams. T-shaped professionals are individuals that are both generalists and specialists at the same time. Across the horizontal of the T you have the broader supporting knowledge and adjacent business topics and the vertical of the T you have the specialist area(s) of the individual.

?Why move towards T-shaped skills?

The increased shared discipline knowledge can increase empathy and collaboration. This increases the flexibility of employees and improves an organisation’s overall efficiency i.e. if a high number of t-shaped individuals work in an organisation they can be used to help experts work on specific backlogs [2]?increasing efficiency and reducing costs of outsourcing experts. T-shapes are particularly suitable for small teams, like agile teams, that don’t have lots of experts and need to move staff around for specific tasks.

T-shaping digital teams with Opquast

Opquast supports the t-shaped approach with generalist foundational training which itself is suitable for all individuals that touch digital or web projects and work. The training teaches fundamental skills in 8 related core disciplines (figure 4 below): accessibility, UX-Usability, Performance, RGPD/Privacy, SEO, Security, E-commerce and Eco-design.

?Most web deliverables will have to satisfy many quality checks and have the input of multiple professionals. Cross-training for web and digital is an opportunity for people to work on tasks with a broader understanding of the inter-related fields that they will need knowledge and understanding of.

All professionals working in digital, including websites, application development and creating digital content such as emails and social media, should grasp that they have a responsibility for UX, accessibility, eco-design, and SEO as a bare minimum and the inter-dependencies and significance of each.

The image below shows three Opquast ‘quality rules’ which engage knowledge of nine different disciplines: Contents, Accessibility, Eco-conception, SEO, Design, Editorial, E-commerce, Privacy, and Development.

T-shaping for Q.A. and Accessibility

Application and website updates are continuous and as mentioned above, new digital content has a broad staff remit and is always being published, continually exposing organisations to risk of poor accessibility or poor user experience.

Experts are essential for deep-dive UX and accessibility analysis and for training and knowledge dissemination, but they don’t have the bandwidth to continually keep accessibility or quality compliance in check. Opquast alone carries 127 [13]?foundational ‘quality rules’ for web accessibility which are relevant to most web and software projects and most digital content.

User experience quality, which has to be inextricably linked to accessibility and inclusion, also has to be a team effort. That is the idea of inspiring ‘quality custodians’ as a central tenet of the Opquast training; everybody takes some responsibility for user quality, they cover their teammate's backs, and they are enriching their skills by taking care of good business practices and ethics.

Part 3 - An Agile Mindset for "T-shaped Agility"

To apply the principles and values of agile you don't necessarily need to follow an agile methodology; below we decouple the human based principles of agile to add 'agility' to our three step framework. These recommendations could therefore be applied under any project management framework, though as we demonstrate below the Opquast QA system is very complementary to agile based methodologies.

Agile itself, is not a methodology, it is essentially a flexible business mindset. In achieving any mindset it is the human factors (training, coaching, leadership and cultural acceptance) which have to be in place and managed effectively.?Indeed it is the lack of focus on this Agile mindset that is often attributed to Agile not scaling or being adopted by organisational cultures [23].

?Agile values and principles are great guiding principles for creating effective teams; also there are endless agile practices that have been created under the various flavours of agile that can be utilised; we will look at a few very useful ones below.

One of the founding members of the Agile Manifesto, Dave Thomas, ?recently stated the importance on focusing on these human factors. Thomas suggested a reboot to focus on ‘agility’ and not the word agile. ?That ‘agility’ should represent the four values of agile:

1??????Individuals and interactions?over processes and tools,

2??????Working software?over comprehensive documentation

3??????Customer collaboration?over contract negotiation

4??????Responding to change?over following a plan.

?

Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for agility

A recent study [2]?by Manchester University recently isolated six main CSFs of successful Agile teams. Four CSFs, Nos. 1, 3, 4 & 5, are methodology agnostic and relate very much to the team approach and agile mindset:

·??????CSF 1 - Multi-skilled teams

·??????CSF 3. Customer involvement

·??????CSF 4. Team autonomy

·??????CSF 5. Continuous learning and improvement

We look at how Opquast Q.A. can be used to target those four CSFs:CSF (highlights below).

(Note: CSF 1 Multi-skilled teams we discussed above with T-shaping.)

CSF 3: Customer Involvement

The Opquast Q.A. system is a customer-centric approach which introduces a broad base of 240 essential foundational customer needs.

The training courses and open-license resources focus on improving: accessibility and inclusion, performance, SEO, ecodesign, privacy and other essential elements that affect the user.

All of the 240 ‘quality rules’ have been developed by community consensus and they reflect immutable and universally implementable user requirements common to most digital projects. The training aims on building empathy and collaboration centred on diverse and inclusive user cases.

CSF 4: Team autonomy and empowerment

“In Scrum, the team is empowered with the authority and resources to find their own way and solve their own problems” Larson 2004

Agile Quality Assurance

Applying the scope of the Opquast web quality resources is best done in an Agile way. It is the objective of the Opquast training to see that the business and technical people have cross-disciplinary skills so they can apply their skills to each relevant task. With the cross-disciplinary approach, teams collaborate better and can be given the autonomy to do so. This is also expressed by the examples below with swarming and pair-programming.

Quality assurance is not something that just needs to be applied at the end of a project. Opquast Q.A. is about empowering staff with a base of essential skills so that at each step within a digital project they can identify the risks and quality issues across very universal risks as accessibility, inclusion, security, privacy, etc . For complex web and software projects not having a comprehensive approach to quality assurance the auditing and assessment of such risks can be an endless job, doomed to failure.

We know from previous studies that removing errors from live software is time-consuming and exponentially expensive [7]. If we can catch most errors before they enter production i.e. before proto-typing and before they hit code then our projects will cost less and go faster.

Opquast also publishes Q.A. check-lists for our projects which can also create a base for our know-how systems. Checklists minimise duplication of effort and human error which in complex digital projects is rife. The checklists are there to free up the mental load of experts who need to work on tasks needing their deeper knowledge and attention. Atul Gawande’s book the “Checklist Manifesto” outlines the value of the checklist; here are a few words from the pioneering Harvard professor and doctor:

“We need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies....it is a check-list".

CSF 5: Continuous improvement and Learning

Agile accessibility example

Opquasts’ founder Elie Slo?m proposed a light framework for Agile accessibility in 20105. The premise was to make accessibility a proactive process and not retrospective; to make it affordable and implementable at the same time as well as a practice to create shared learning “Ideally, Agile accessibility could even contribute to the transfer of skills from experts to project teams, to the point of gradually limiting the use of experts”. Slo?m and Deschamp noted the sizeable task left by some audits means that accessibility often has to take a continuous improvement approach.

Example 1 – pair programming & swarming

Stephane Deschamps formalised and published some of the principles and practical Agile procedures [6]. Deschamps recommends pair programming, taken from Kent Beck’s XP ( eXtreme Programming), whereby the accessibility expert would be part of the coding procedure for the complex parts of the system to build in the accessibility requirements. While the availability of expert accessibility resources can be scarce, for organisations that employ lots of developers and a few accessibility experts this can be a highly valued shared learning and on-the-job training opportunity.

The pair-programming has indeed solved other expert issues and grumbles13,14?which are commonly experienced by teams, for instance issues between Agile and UX such as projects where incremental deliverables and tight sprints commonly side-line deeper UX work.

Pair programming is also a great tool for knowledge transfer within robust onboarding systems so new recruits can get up to speed quickly on projects and learn relevant skills and business logic. Fowler et al28?stated it’s flexibility and importance in software development “so many dismiss it quickly when it feels uncomfortable. However, in our experience, pair programming is vital for collaborative teamwork and high-quality software”.

Swarming

For accessibility specifically, perhaps more than two experts will work together. Depending upon the skills available within a team and the work complexity demands you may have many experts work alongside each other.

Swarming is an agile practice often used to concentrate larger numbers of a team on tasks and this frequently includes pair programming as a central part of the solution. At the New York Times, Olivier De Meulder’s discusses how by including Q.A. testers in their swarms during the coding of features they identify bugs and off features early on. Olivier’s comments ring more loudly now than ever “Few problems in this world don’t benefit from increased communication and software development is no exception….increased communication leads to better software design decisions”[29].

The swarms great influence on driving better communications can be further complemented with the T-shaped generalist skills of Opquast. With Opquast training, the swarm will be QA focused and understand key accessibility requirements so key design errors can be avoided upstream, as discussed above, and at every point of the swarm's development cycle. Besides accessibility knowledge, with Opquast training the swarm will also have user empathy awareness and UX-related knowledge such as eco-design, performance, privacy etc for better integration of compliance issues.

To really optimise the effectiveness of swarming and pair-programming the steps and approaches highlighted in this series should be considered. With the right approach and support ecosystem our teams will be en route to achieving something as close to a swarm intelligence as is achievable, resulting in quicker, more effective team decisions and better instincts to steer the team away from problems and towards success.

Summary and Takeaways

In this series, we hope to have demonstrated some useful and compelling synergies by implementing the three component parts i.e. onboarding, T-shaping and Agile principles alongside Opquast. Figure 4 below illustrates a base team support and learning infrastructure which adds the Agile and t-shaped elements to the SHRM HR onboarding recommendations.

By combining great onboarding, coaching, training and Agile practices our teams will have the best collaborative possibilities and the most robust blend of expert and generalist skills. In order to build effective t-shaped teams in the longer term, we need to give enough exposure to specialist work to targeted individuals as part of well-designed skills and training matrices, otherwise, skills redundancy will never be achieved. We must also be aware of creating equal opportunities for neurodiverse both for inclusion purposes and also for those unique skills and advantages they can bring in certain areas.

We must consider training programmes at individual and team levels to affect our culture. Opquast only plays a small part in cultural change and will complement and reinforce cultural characteristics that exist or are part of a structured change management program. Structuring coaching roles, Part 3 - figure 4 above, is essential in creating agile mindsets and also seeding quality approaches such as Opquast. In trying to achieve the ‘T-shaped agility’(figure 5 below) our top management must also work to absorb the values and approaches into the organisational culture as philosophies and practices [23,24]?.

As the new hybrid working paradigm settles in it is becoming increasingly important to build reciprocal trust between employer and employee. To do that careful consideration of the continuous development, empowerment and support of our teams is crucial. It is those organisations that balance the complex work-life equation that will come out on top; or at least will attract the best people. ?It is those organisations that deserve to become the future places where most of us will want to work.

Part 1 References:

1. Gallup’s Perspective on Creating an Exceptional Onboarding Journey for New Employees 2019

2. Saks, A. M. (1995). Longitudinal field investigation of the moderating and mediating effects of self-efficacy on the relationship between training and newcomer adjustment. Journal of Applied Psychology, 80, 211-225

3.SHRM Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success https://www.shrm.org/foundation/ourwork/initiatives/resources-from-past-initiatives/Documents/Onboarding%20New%20Employees.pdf

4.The effectiveness of an organizational level orientation training program in the socialization of new hires. Personnel Psychology Klein, H.J., & Weaver, N.A. (2000).

5. https://houst10.medium.com/four-people-planet-focused-strategies-to-inspire-organisations-beyond-the-digital-transformation-1c383aceaad

6. https://www.i-scoop.eu/charlene-li-an-interview-on-leadership-and-digital-transformation/

7. https://owllabs.eu/state-of-hybrid-work-emea/2022

8.https://www.opquast.com/en/certification/web-qa/

9. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/2020-birth-of-the-trust-economy/

10. https://www.opquast.com/en/making-the-web-better/

11. https://theenergyproject.com/

12. “Why Finding Meaning At Work Is More Important Than Feeling Happy” https://www.fastcompany.com/3032126/how-to-find-meaning-during-your-pursuit-of-happiness-at-work

Part 2 References

1. Chief executive.net https://chiefexecutive.net/ideo-ceo-tim-brown-t-shaped-stars-the-backbone-of-ideoaes-collaborative-culture__trashed/

2. https://jchyip.medium.com/why-t-shaped-people-e8706198e437

3. https://medium.com/@daverooneyca/icicle-shaped-people-45f3640dd329

4. https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#team

5. Harvard Business Review May 2017 Neurodiversity Is a Competitive Advantage (hbr.org)

6. Asperger’s Syndrome and Humor – The Asperger / Autism Network (AANE)

7. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-concept-of-neurodiversity-is-dividing-the-autism-community/

8. Oct 15 2021 Ludmila N. Praslova Ph.D SHRM-SCP

Autistic strengths, human value, and human uniqueness: Untangling the strengths-based approach from stereotypes and simplifications.

9. https://uofgpgrblog.com/pgrblog/2021/3/24/neurodiversity

10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills#cite_note-2

11. https://jchyip.medium.com/how-to-develop-t-shaped-people-993349932f90

12. https://www.forrester.com/blogs/expertise-and-the-shared-services-problem-a-conversation-with-don-reinertsen

13. https://checklists.opquast.com/en/web-quality-assurance/?tag=accessibility

14. https://blog.shrm.org/blog/7-do-s-and-don-ts-of-inclusion-by-design

15. https://www2.deloitte.com/xe/en/insights/topics/talent/neurodiversity-in-the-workplace.html

16. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman%27s_stages_of_group_development

Part 3 References:

1. https://www.forrester.com/blogs/expertise-and-the-shared-services-problem-a-conversation-with-don-reinertsen/

2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alliancembs/2021/01/29/what-makes-an-agile-team-six-factors-for-future-success/?sh=135c07732a5c

3. https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/t-shape-deception

4. https://agilemanifesto.org/

5. https://openweb.eu.org/articles/accessibilite_agile

6. https://openweb.eu.org/articles/agile-accessibility-from-theory-to-practice

7. https://www.opquast.com/en/certification/web-qa/

8. Robert Pressman , 1992 Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach propose

9. Larman, C. 2004. Agile & Iterative Development: A Manager’s Guide, Boston: Addison-Wesley

10. Henderson-Sellers, B., and Serour, M. K. 2005. “Creating a Dual-Agility Method: The Value of Method Engineering,” Journal of Database Management (16:4), pp. 1-23.

11. T-shaped individuals and opquast training – paul houston

12. VPTCS articles

13. https://uxdesign.cc/ux-unhappy-in-agile-it-might-be-because-of-these-4-reasons-921790326cf

14. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/agile-not-easy-ux/

15. https://medium.com/product-labs/how-designers-and-developers-can-pair-together-to-create-better-products-e4b09e3ca096

16. https://checklists.opquast.com/en/web-quality-assurance/

17. https://www.slideshare.net/AgileNZ/ahmed-sidky-keynote-agilenz

18. https://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile.html

19. Part 2 t-shaped teams Opquast https://www.opquast.com/en/t-shaped-individuals-for-effective-web-projects/

20. https://www.scaledagileframework.com/pi-planning/

21. Risk-First Software Development: Volume 1: The Menagerie Rob Moffat 2019 https://riskfirst.org/overview/Start

22. https://www.infoq.com/articles/book-review-risk-free-software-development/

23. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/08/10/doing-agile-being-agile-and-achieving-agility/?sh=671230447643

24. https://www.repsly.com/blog/field-team-management/creating-agility-within-your-organization

25. https://agilescientific.com/blog/2012/4/17/checklists-for-everyone.html

26. https://digital.ai/catalyst-blog/the-agile-checklist-manifesto

27. https://digital.ai/resource-center/content/15th-annual-state-of-agile-report-review-findings-with-richard-knaster

28. https://martinfowler.com/articles/on-pair-programming.html#ToPairOrNotToPair

29 Olivier De Meulder March 2018 https://open.nytimes.com/scrum-swarm-sprint-how-to-take-the-agile-process-and-make-it-your-own-b6416793ff7e

30. https://hbr.org/2016/05/embracing-agile

31. https://www.pentalog.com/blog/devops/agility-without-devops-is-pointless/