Winning Tactics for Successful Teams

“If football were played by robots, I would win everything.” Marcelo Bielsa

This is the second blog post of my series on how to build a team that can win. In the last blog I discussed how to motivate the team and in subsequent blogs I will discuss Ability, Fitness, Motivation, Power and Luck.        

No matter how motivated your team is, if your tactics are wrong, you're never going to win a soccer match. The same applies to business teams - to win you need to achieve an effective work pattern. So in this blog I look at ?what tactics are the best, and how you can implement them.

Strategy v Tactics

I see the terms strategy and tactics used interchangeably, but they are at two ends of the scale. The strategy defines the problems you aim to solve in the long term and explains why. The tactics outline how you will approach solving these problems on a day-to-day basis.

The strategy will be hard to adjust, but tactics should change to make sure they are effective or continue to be effective. In software delivery the strategy is defined by the product owner, how to achieve that strategy should be the role of the delivery team. There are many great books on how to define and execute strategy and product management, but here I want to dive deeper in to how to organize a team in order to achieve the strategy.

?“A good team plays with intelligence, awareness, and a good tactical structure.” Arsène Wenger

My best tactics for a delivery-focused team is to:

1.????? ?Focus on outcomes

2.????? Experiment

3.????? Use Lean principles

4.????? Implement a team organisation framework

5.????? Define Roles and Responsibilities

1.????? Focus on outcomes

Once the product owner has defined and stated their strategy, work with them to identify the desired outcomes. These can be expressed as OKRs.

Being focused on outcomes means that you will aim to solve the real problem rather than just delivering tasks blindly. It increases innovation and gives the team greater flexibility in how they achieve the required results.

2.????? Experimenting/Intelligent failure

To achieve these outcomes, you need to experiment. Create a hypothesis that a chosen? change will create the desired outcome and then try it, analyse the results and if it doesn't have the desired outcome iterate (or tweak) the experiment or try something completely different.

Make sure if the experiment fails it is intelligent – by this I mean that it is Quick, Cheap and Unique. I have already written a blog on Intelligent Failure.

How do you choose and prioritise your experiments? In game theory there is a practice of backwards induction - this can be used to identify feature prioritization. In backwards induction you start with the desired outcome and work backwards to identify and prioritize the most critical features that need to be developed first.

Here's a soccer analogy example which might explain things clearer -

In this scenario the striker is approaching the goal with the ball, and there are 3 seconds left in the game. The striker must make a series of quick decisions to score.

• At 1 second (final decision), the striker is in the penalty area and must decide to shoot or pass. Shooting has a 70% chance of scoring, passing has a 30% chance. Optimal choice: Shoot.
• At 2 seconds, the striker is at the edge of the penalty area. The options are to either dribble into the area or attempt a long shot. Dribbling leads to the higher probability shooting opportunity in step 1. Optimal choice: Dribble into the area.
• At 3 seconds (initial decision), the striker is approaching the penalty area. The options are to sprint forward or attempt to draw a foul. Sprinting forward leads to the optimal dribbling opportunity in step 2. Optimal choice: Sprint forward.

Let’s transpose this into a Software development situation -

• Final stage (Month 6) Target = 50,000 active users

- Required feature: Advanced reporting and analytics

• Month 5 Target = 40,000 users

- Feature: Integration with popular third-party tools

• Month 4 Target = 30,000 users

- Feature: Mobile app launch

• Month 3 Target = 20,000 users

- Feature: Team collaboration tools

• Month 2 Target = 10,000 users

- Feature: Task management and scheduling

• Month 1 (Launch) Target = 5,000 users

- Core features: User authentication, project creation, basic task management

In the example above we don't know if the task management and scheduling features will achieve 10K extra users but it is an experiment we will try.

You can read more in "The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life" (Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff).

3.????? Use Lean principles

To follow on from experimenting, you need to conduct these experiments as cheaply as possible. This means using the Minimum Viable product principle, popularised by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup.

Do the least you need to do to prove or disprove your hypothesis, validate it and learn; and then either Pivot or Continue with the current approach.

4.????? Team Organisation

"Talk to each other" is the most common phrase shouted by soccer team coaches at the junior level (I know because I do it!). You need to create a way of working within the team that means they own the delivery, they coordinate tasks and they inspect, adapt and improve.

This is where Agile ways of working can help, especially the Scrum framework. It offers a standard operating model which provides opportunities to communicate (daily meetings) and regular intervals to reflect on progress with Iterations (Sprints) and a formalised approach to approve the team (retrospectives).

5.????? Roles and Responsibilities

In a soccer team you can't have 11 defenders, you need a mixture of competencies. A coach will think carefully about who is performing what role. In a business team this is rarely done beyond asking the question, “do you have the necessary job functions filled?” (e.g. DevOps, Tester, Devs).

In "Team Roles at Work" (R. M. Belbin), the author describes the following roles:

Action-oriented Roles

• Shaper - Challenges the team to improve and pushes for action.
• Implementer - Turns ideas into practical actions; reliable and efficient.
• Completer-Finisher - Ensures thoroughness and attention to detail.

People-oriented Roles

• Coordinator - Acts as a facilitator, ensuring that everyone is involved and focused on team goals.
• Team worker - Supports team members and promotes harmony within the group.
• Resource Investigator - Explores opportunities and develops contacts outside the team.

Thought-oriented Roles

• Plant - Generates creative ideas and solutions; often seen as the innovator.
• Monitor-Evaluator - Analyses ideas critically; provides objective judgment.
• Specialist - Brings in-depth knowledge or expertise in a specific area.

Make sure you have most of these roles covered within your team - this can be multiple roles per person. Make sure they know that this is the role(s) they bring to the team. Encourage them to expand on this role and improve in it.

If you think that an important role is not fulfilled by a team member, think about who could do this role and speak to them about stepping up into it.

Making sure you have the right players in the team, and they can do the tasks they are assigned will be discussed in subsequent blog on Ability.

If you can create the perfect tactics suited to your situation you will have an all-conquering team which will succeed in any situation.

Let me know how you get on.

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