Tag: Team

Great Places to Work. Part Two: What can you do to help create a great place to work.

Written by Ryland Leyton on October 3, 2018. Posted in Articles.

In part one of this article, we reviewed a survey I held that established the following five things as attributes of making somewhere a Great Place To Work (GPTW).

The top two were highly consistent and close in order:

Flexibility (1.3)
Daily work I like doing (1.7)

The next three were also highly consistent, with two being almost tied for position:

Excellent company culture (3.3)
Professional growth (4.0)
Excellent supervisor (4.3)

We talked about what these mean. In this article we’re going to talk about what you can do to help make your job a Great Place To Work.

Flexibility

While a lot of this is controlled by the specific needs and environment of your workplace, if you’re a manager can help you can help make this happen by setting expectations about service levels. How rapidly communications are to be returned, what core business hours should be kept, how to handle deadlines and responsibilities. How work-from-home is to be scheduled or communicated. As a manager, holding people accountable for outcomes instead of process will make you highly appreciated! (It might just reduce your management headaches, too!)

If you’re an employee and you need more flexibility than you have, you can start a dialogue with your supervisor about what kinds of flexibility you need. You should back up your request with a proposal about how you intend to be visibly, transparently, and easily accountable for this. Ensure that giving you more flexibility doesn’t entail more work for the supervisor!

Daily work I like doing

At the simplest level, work is you employing your time and skills in exchange for money from your employer: you should enjoy it as much as it is possible. Working somewhere that aligns with your interests and goals will move you from having just a jay-oh-bee, to somewhere that you are happier and more invested in because it helps drive your own success, however you’ve defined it.

Beyond that, you have to know what you like doing and be honest about it at interviews. It is hard to get what you want, if you don’t know what you want!

For supervisors, you have a lot of control about this by being honest about what the job entails, what the day looks like, and by working hard to get the right candidate, not just any candidate, into open positions. Obviously, this is something you control more from the hiring process than the actual job itself. The job itself simply is what it is.

Excellent company culture

As we talked about in part one, this is a hard item to pin down, and in my opinion it definitely is about the common values and behaviors of the people in the company.

Senior level and leadership employees definitely influence culture more strongly than less senior ones…but we are always strong influences in the space immediately around us. A commitment to having strong values, showing them through your actions, and keeping a positive, supportive, empowering and enabling environment is something that anyone can make, no matter what kind of position they hold!

Whether you are an individual contributor or a manager you always influence those around you. Make your influence something positive, creative, supportive, and growth-oriented, and you will find it makes a difference to others.

Professional growth

The good thing here is that you have huge control and influence on this one, no matter who you are! As an analyst, project manager, team lead or stakeholder you can try new techniques as they apply to your situation, you can encourage others to participate. You can hold lunch-and-learn sessions around topics of interest. You can organize book clubs, or keep plugged-in to the professional events in your city and let your team know about them. The list goes on and on!

Of our five things, this is the easiest one. You can immediately make a contribution of your choosing here!

Excellent supervisor

If you are a supervisor, you know that this is important to your team, and this is the one that only you can control. There are tons of books regarding management and leadership, and I won’t try to recap those here. I think employees want to know that their supervisor is looking out for them, has their best interests in mind, and is conscious of connecting them with the kinds of opportunities the employees want to have.Let me prompt you with a few questions to consider.

Can you answer these questions about each member of your team?

What are their professional interests and passions?
What is important to them outside the office?
Given their career stage and goals, what expectations do they have of you?

When you think about yourself:

Are you giving appropriate levels of supervision, helping where needed, avoiding micromanagement?
Are you a servant leader?

Obviously, that’s just a start. Maybe a final question is: are you being the kind of supervisor you would have valued before you got into management?

What does this mean for you?

Making a great place to work is a little like the old story of Stone Soup – everyone benefits when everyone contributes something to the pot!

Your contribution can be anything. If it aligns with something valuable to your workplace you’ll stand out more, make a difference to your co-workers, and be seen as a more valuable team member by people above you in the organization!

Best wishes in your career & life,
Ryland

Great Places to Work. Part one: What makes somewhere “A Great Place To Work”?

Written by Ryland Leyton on September 26, 2018. Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Great Places to Work. Part one: What makes somewhere “A Great Place To Work”?

A few weeks ago and related to a talk I was planning, I put a survey out regarding what is most important in making somewhere “a great place to work” (GPTW, for brevity).

I had about 100 responses and the results were really interesting to me, and it is time to share them!

I wanted the survey to be brief and still produce some useful information. In addition to a few demographics, I offered 11 items and asked people to sort them in forced-rank order of what, in their opinion, makes somewhere a GPTW.

Who answered the survey?

Responders were mostly people who self-identify as:

Mid career (53%) or late career (32%)
Located in North America (95%).
Indicate that the top priority in their life is (61%) “work and family”, or (31%) “career & professional work”.

Based on the audiences who were told about the survey, I’m guessing that most people are professional class, working in offices for companies of various sizes.

What makes a great place to work?

Regarding the rank-ordering, I can say that 5 things stood out from the 11 items I offered the responders. The number in parentheses is the average ranked score of the item.

The top two were highly consistent and close in order:

Flexibility (1.3)
Daily work I like doing (1.7)

The next three were also highly consistent, with two being almost tied for position:

Excellent company culture (3.3)
Professional growth (4.0)
Excellent supervisor (4.3)

So what? What should this mean to me?

There are 5 things people say that create a GPTW.
If you are an individual contributor, you can control or influence 3 or 4 of them.
If you are a manager that number goes up by one.

We’ll talk about what you can do to influence each of these in part 2 of this article; but for now, let’s consider what they mean.

Flexibility

Flexibility to manage one’s own schedule, handle routine and emergency family events, and self-direct their own activity is simply critical to employees today. And, I don’t think the generation of the employee makes a difference! Given that our responders put family first, and are people in mid-to-late professional careers, this is an expectation of the workplace.

If your workplace isn’t acknowledging this fact of modern professional life I’m willing to bet you have a staff turnover problem at your office.

Daily work I like doing

A lot of people say they don’t like their job, but once you make the distinction between a “great place to work” and “a great place to take a vacation”, they admit they do like their job, in the context of potential employers.

Excellent company culture

This means different things to different people. There are obviously a lot of ways to think about this, as it is a bit of a “squishy” term. I think that even if we can’t define it perfectly, we all know a good one from a bad one – at least for ourselves! Let’s try this one.

Culture: the way that people in an organization hold to a particular set of values, driving forces, and goals, as well as the behaviors they exhibit in doing so.

What jokes do they tell? How seriously do people take the mission of the organization? How much do leaders acknowledge/commend/reward those who act in alignment with the mission and values? This is part of what goes into “culture”.

I can definitely say that it is created by people. That means that we contribute to it wherever we work.

Professional growth

The ability to grow, learn, and advance in one’s profession as a routine job experience is a priority. It may not be on every project, or every day, but it does mean that people want some innate development in the course of their work.

Excellent supervisor

“People don’t leave jobs, they leave supervisors”, is a common truism. In a troubled workplace, a great supervisor can be like a lifeboat captain, ensuring the safety of the team, earning their trust, and guiding them through the storm. That team is solid and may hate their workplace, but love their job. In a great workplace, a bad supervisor is like having a reservation at a 5-star hotel…but you have to sleep in the laundry room.

A supervisor is the company to their employees, and good or bad makes a big difference.

Having a supervisor who you trust, who has your back, who demonstrates caring about you as person and a professional, is never to be taken lightly.

What’s in it for me?

Before reading part two, think about these questions:

What do you look for in a great place to work?
Do you agree or disagree with the survey results and my interpretation?

Last, if there’s anyone that helps make your place somewhere great to work, let them know! They’ll appreciate it!

5 Steps to Prevent that Overwhelmed Feeling

Written by Raji Pillay on August 16, 2018. Posted in Articles. 2 Comments on 5 Steps to Prevent that Overwhelmed Feeling

There are numerous reasons to get overwhelmed as a Business Analyst in a project. The requirements aren’t shaping up; there is no vision for the product and the solution design isn’t complete. As a Technical BA, you are anxious about starting.

And so it continues…

In a utopian world, everyone is on the same page, stakeholders have their vision organized, and all a BA has to do is, understand it, articulate it and help deliver it.

Easy-peasy!!! If only this were true in the real world.

On certain projects, I have felt overwhelmed and at a loss on simply where to start and what are the milestones we are planning to achieve. At times, it feels the project will never start or worse, it will never end. Also, after discussing this with fellow BA’s I have concluded: I am not the only one.

Captured here are the 5 mantras I now follow, and they have helped me secure my footing in the world of projects:

“Converse and Collaborate”: I believe it is one of the core requirements of being a BA. It is the crux of what we do. It is critical to make a start, to gather and collate information, to facilitate, to start making sense. First and foremost start talking to the entire spectrum of stakeholders: business, end-users, architects, implementers, testers, security. Even if the dots don’t connect, keep these conversations and collaborations flowing. These conversations need to be frequent at the start of the project and then they can be scheduled as required. Yes, a BA needs to have the conversations with the stakeholders but equally important is all the stakeholders coming together and brainstorming. Get your business and users together to brainstorm requirements, understand what they need, what is the vision, what end user problem are they trying to solve with this requirement. Once that is underway, get the technical team in workshops, either you can be the product owner or have someone from business play the role. Again, these workshops should be conducted as often as it is required for the design to start taking shape.
“Break it down and Bring it together”: Even if the information is not lining up and seems absolutely haphazard, record it. If there is no structure at the beginning, don’t fret. It will start taking shape. The roadmap will start showing itself through these conversations and information. Different categories will emerge out of the information, which at the beginning may seem random. Break down your requirements into manageable/understandable pieces of work. In an agile world, you start splitting them into epics. Categorize the pieces based on a theme. The theme in turn, can be based on a roadmap, milestone, functionality, menu of the application, the infrastructure it lives on, so on and so forth. When you pick up a bite sized piece of requirement, analyse it with developers, quality, performance testers, security architects, operations and DevOps. It doesn’t have to be a detailed design at this point. But the various perspectives will start shedding light on the details, unknowns and the risks. This will start bringing the variables on a requirement together.
“Step in and Step back”: Facilitating conversations is imperative. Have an agenda and communicate the same before you bring the stakeholders together. As a Business Analyst, step in to ensure the conversations are flowing in a way to achieve the expected outcome of the meeting. At times, the conversation drifts towards a topic/constraint/feature that no one anticipated. Let it continue. These inputs uncover a can of worms that was not thought about originally. It adds a different dimension to the requirement that needs more work. Stepping back during technical conversations allows the team to brainstorm solutions, uncover unanticipated blockers or just a different approach to achieve the solution.
“Revisit and Revise”: The requirements have started to make sense but the requirements might change; technically the requirement might not be doable, you might run into licensing issues, a feature might take longer than anticipated, third party constraints might pop up, a functionality would now be considered “good to have” instead of “must have”. Revisit your epics/roadmap and adjust.
“Validate and Verify”: You don’t want the technical teams to be designing a beautiful solution that doesn’t solve the given problem. Keep validating your requirements, keep verifying the solution. Acceptance criteria, the definition of done and test strategy at the beginning of the SDLC will help in achieving the right goals efficiently. These need to be continuously validated by the business. The product owner or the business from where the requirements originate need to be kept in the loop. I strongly advocate for the business to be involved during the development lifecycle. Issues or changes can be caught before they become critical or un-manageable.

Every Business Analyst has her/his own strategy that works. These steps have been my go to when I feel overwhelmed. Whether it is a small requirement or a program of work, I take one step at a time and the progress comes with it.

What is your strategy?

Are you struggling to elicit requirements from your Stakeholders?

Written by Sally Craik on August 8, 2018. Posted in Articles.

Gathering requirements from business stakeholders on your project is often very demanding and sometimes uneventful.

There are a number of ways to drive the conversations to ensure the requirements are captured and turned into meaningful detailed requirements.

This article suggests some tips to nurture the most out of the project team during requirements gathering.

Ensure you have buy-in from the project team

The team has been selected by their managers to participate in the project. They are the ones with the subject matter expertise. These team members must have the right attitude for the project and understand what it means to workshop requirements. Projects team members must be 100 % committed to the project and understand the project outcome.

Ensure the team understand why requirements gathering is important

Inform the team how important this part of the project stage is. If the scoping process and fleshing out of the requirements is not carried out correctly and efficiently prior to the development stage, then later on the team will be left with a long list of clarifications and a long list of issues during the testing stage.

Prior to the workshops

It is always good practice to discuss the approach you will take for the requirements gathering sessions. This needs to take place before the workshops. It is a good idea to have a brief meeting on the approach that will be used. The meeting will also cover any questions that people may have including ensuring they understand what activities they will be performing.

If this approach meeting is held first, then the team can dive straight into requirements workshops. Remember, everyone’s time is precious.

What kind of workshops?

Always have the problem statement close at hand. That way everyone can keep referring back to it during the workshops.

User stories form a good basis that can be developed and fleshed out during the workshops. Requirements that are captured using user stories tend to capture three key items: Who the user is; what the user needs; why the user wants it.

Use these stories and keep referring back to them while developing your requirements.

Processes

Business processes are key assets to the project. The current processes in both diagram and steps formats are one of the main essentials for capturing and developing requirements. They describe how things are done and provide insight on how things could be improved on and how they are done.

Mapping out future state processes may take several workshops however once a couple of processes are near complete the team will understand why these are so important.

Summary

The three key items to successfully elicit requirements from the Stakeholders:

Engage > Question > Confirm

Blind Men and the Elephant

Written by Parvathi Iyer on July 25, 2018. Posted in Articles.

Teamwork: The Key to Successful Project Execution!

It was six men of Indostan
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind …

“The Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887)

We all know the parable “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” and the moral behind it. Newly-formed project teams are not unlike the blind men – every member comes in with a different specialty and role, and with it, a different perspective of what needs to be done, in addition to how and what the end result should be. This is especially true in today’s world, with matrix-ed and virtual project teams comprised of people in different continents with desperate cultural backgrounds coming together to form a singular project team

Now, consider a situation that most of us have encountered a time or two. From the time an airplane lands at an airport, to the time it’s turned around for departure, there are a large array of synchronized activities and handoffs. This is the point at which passengers will deplane (“Please take all your belongings when you deplane, please collect your luggage from carousel nine in the D Concourse, please check monitors for connecting flights”) and the ground crew unloads cargo (and makes sure the bags actually show up on carousel nine in the D Concourse), clean up the airplane (“As a courtesy to the cleaning crew and the folks boarding after you, please do not stuff used tissues, newspapers, coffee cups, cans and whatever other garbage you have in the seat pocket in front of you – instead hand it to the flight attendant when she comes to collect”), make sure a fresh pot of coffee is ready for brewing and the soda cans and peanuts (or pretzels) are stacked and locked.

At the ticket counter, crews make sure the new set of passengers are all checked in and ready with the right sized baggage (“No, the third bag is not allowed,” “No, you cannot stuff that oversized bag in the overhead locker,” “No more First Class seats are available for free upgrades,” “Yes, it’s a middle seat … I don’t have a window or an aisle seat to offer you”) to board the plane. Towards the underbelly of the airplane, the cargo handlers are busy, first unloading, and then loading up the correct bags (and sometimes the wrong ones) tagged to make it to the new destination. Somewhere in the middle of this, the plane gets all the mandatory maintenance checks completed and certified for operational readiness to take off again.

All the while, the pilot has his eye on the takeoff window as scheduled with the airport tower for an on-time departure (airlines get fined for late departures, by the way). Like the old fable, every part of the airplane is touched by a different team with a different perspective, but unlike the fable, they do know the big picture and what part they play in it. They have a singular focus – to ensure an on-time departure.

In 1965, Bruce Tuckman published his theory, called “Tuckman’s Stages” based on research he conducted on team dynamics. Tuckman described the first four phases of team formation as: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. He later added a fifth phase called Adjourning. Mapping Tuckman’s concept to the project phases of Initiation, Planning, Execution, Monitoring and Control & Closure, gives a Project Manager the ability to monitor team dynamics, watch for signs of team dysfunction and create the correct atmosphere to ensure team performance.

From the time a new team is formed during Project Initiation and Project Planning phases, through the Project Execution phase to the Project Closure phase, team dynamics change. Let’s consider two groups of factors:

Readiness: This includes project and technical readiness – ensuring that all processes are in place and that everybody involved knows what’s expected of them. All activities that can be planned for and scheduled fall in this category.
Willingness: Everything that is more nebulous, and that which cannot be planned for, falls under this category. That includes attitudes, teamwork, flexibility to try something different and morale.

In the Project Initiation phase, all teams are enthusiastic and willingness factors are high, but the readiness factors are not, as the project is still in its inception. This is the Forming phase for the team. Team building starts in earnest in the Project Planning phase with the Storming and Norming phases. As the readiness factors increase with planning, and the team works together, differences arise and willingness factors decrease, till the team establishes a new norm and stabilizes. It is key that Project Managers pay attention to team dynamics at this phase of the project. Some of the common signs of dysfunctions in teams that a PM should watch for and correct in the Project Planning phase include:

“ I have opinions of my own – strong opinions – but I don’t always agree with them.” – George H.W. Bush
It’s important to remind the team again and again that in a modern day project environment, messages are formulated and decisions are made as a collective. No individual person gets to be the sole decision maker. For a team to work together and a project to succeed, everybody on the team needs to accept that not every individual opinion will count. It is key that individuals learn to disagree with each other – and sometimes with their own opinions – but still commit to the project and teamwork.
“Decisions get made by those who show up” – President Jed Bartlett, The West Wing
Positive participation is key to ensuring that everybody’s voice is heard and that they influence decisions. Watching from the sidelines, waiting for perfection, complaining, pointing at failures and “I told you so”s should not influence project decisions. These behaviors should be actively discouraged. To be good project advocates, positive participation, i.e., participation with the goal to find solutions, is key. This discipline needs to instilled in teams from the get go.
“People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do” – Isaac Asimov
Sadly, none of us knows “it all.” A lot of what passes off as “knowledge” is often based on hearsay facts, which may not be based on any real requirements. Project Managers have to often play Devil’s advocate, help teams find ways to validate what they know, and identify the gaps in their collective knowledge and form informed opinions.
“Don’t shoot the messenger” – Age-old idiom
One major sign of a dysfunctional team is the culture of shooting the messenger. In most projects, the Project Manager coordinates the decision making process, and serves as the mouth-piece disseminating the decisions to the rest of the team. This makes him/her the prime candidate to be shot at and lose the trust of the team. The project manager needs to create trust in the team by ensuring fairness. He/She should be the best advocate for team members, ensuring that individual voices are heard.

Ideally, when exiting out of the Project Planning phase with the right emphasis on team building, the team should be synchronized and playing well together and in the Fourth Quadrant, where they are willing and ready. The PM should actively work to resolve team issues and build trust and confidence among members to get them to – and keep the team in – the Fourth Quadrant through the lifecycle of the project. Along with paying attention to the project budget, schedule, deliverables, quality and other metrics, it’s the PM’s responsibility to actively monitor team dynamics and ensure that the project team is functioning optimally as part of the Monitor and Control phase.

In today’s complex world, no project can be an individual achievement. It takes a well-functioning team(s) to work in tandem to deliver a successful project. And what makes a well-functioning team(s) is its ability to integrate varying perspectives into the singular focus of achieving the project’s goal. Teams build trust by understanding and integrating different perspectives: They work smarter, are more creative and are more flexible. The sooner this integration happens, the smoother project execution is achieved.

Note on Agile Projects: Immaterial of the methodology followed, team dynamics plays a part in the success of every project, be it traditional or agile. Agile projects lend themselves to self-organizing teams where teams decide on the velocity (pace) of execution and delivery. It’s a fallacy to assume that agile teams are well performing of the bat with little or no focus needed on team dynamics. However, agile projects do have a shorter plan to delivery cycles, which help highlight team issues sooner. Agile teams should carve out time for honest self-reflection, and actively find ways to work better and improve on team dynamics as part of the Sprint Retrospectives.