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The Cause, Cost, and Countermeasure to Conflict in an Organization

Written by Jon Isaacson on . Posted in Articles.

If you have dysfunction in your team, the cost may be higher than you want to admit but the cure may also be closer than you realize.

Frustration in the workplace, does such a thing exist? In a recent article in Forbes magazine, researchers discussed the primary sources of disgruntlement within organizations. According to the study, most employees noted that they were frustrated by personality differences and incompetence in their co-workers. This is not news to anyone who has worked in an organizational setting, one human plus one human will eventually equal conflict. The potential for conflict, as well as the intensity and duration, are compounded by the number of humans added to the equation. More people, more problems. What is interesting about the Forbes article is that upon further investigation there was an underlying source which contributed to the environment of dysfunction,

“In fact, teams having conflict had much higher levels of ambiguity in three categories of work: their team’s goals, roles, and procedures. So, while it is very human to assign personal motive and blame in times of trouble, there isn’t really anything personal about the core of workplace conflict. If you back up and look at the facts, a lack of clarity is what’s truly to blame.” (Wakeman, 2015)

The need for clarity is foundational to functionality and trust within an organization. Where there is a lack of clarity, there will be conflict. Office drama is costly, CPP Inc. performed a study in 2008 which discovered that employees in the United States spent 2.8 hours per week dealing with conflict which CPP estimated as costing over $359 billion in paid hours or the equivalent of 385 million working days (Lawler, 2010). Every business understands the need to watch the bottom line, so why are mangers unwilling to recognize the high cost of conflict? Think of it, if every employee in your office could increase engagement and efficiency by 7% by only changing one element, wouldn’t that be something a wise leader would be more intentional about?

Recognize the cost of inaction. Managers spend much of their time putting out fires, and yet our discussion to this point has demonstrated that the cure for dysfunction may be closer that you think. By understanding the cost of conflict, we recognize the value of investing in practices that will help our organization to identify and address these hot beds of discordance within our teams.

Realize the need to eliminate the blame game. When employees focus on blaming each other, too often managers are happy to allow them to target their ire upon each other rather than dealing with the core of these issues which creates a negatively recurring cycle. As noted by the author in a prior article – how leaders respond to conflicts can either reinforce cultural values that strengthen the team, or they can respond in ways that destroy morale (Isaacson, 2016).

Reduce conflict by creating clarity. If the research from Wakeman and her team as outlined in Forbes is accurate, then leaders can make a significant reduction in interpersonal conflict by being more intentional about organizational clarity. As a leader, you can alleviate friction between team members by being more clear about team goals, roles, and procedures as quoted above.

If we can sense the frustration in the organization and we can calculate the deep costs, we should be proactive in working towards long-term solutions. Often inaction is caused by an inability to identify the causes or formulate an effective plan, but now that these have been brought to light the only question left is whether we will be intentional about getting into the mix to make the magic happen. There are no shortcuts when working with interpersonal dynamics but progress is attainable through the countermeasures for the conflict we have discussed.

References
Wakeman, Cy (2015, June 22) The number 1 source of workplace conflict, and how to avoid it. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/cywakeman/2015/06/22/the-1-source-of-workplace-conflict-and-how-to-avoid-it/#32a27f89126e
Lawler, Jennifer (2010, June 21) The real cost of workplace conflict. Entrepreneur. Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/207196
 Isaacson, Jon (2016, July 11) Eliminating blame in your organization. Retrieved from http://izvents.weebly.com/words/eliminating-blame-in-your-organization

Clear Project Goals = Better Team Relationships

Written by Paul Crosby on . Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Clear Project Goals = Better Team Relationships

We hear those words regularly: “We need to be more competitive!” Competition is good and competition is bad. When it’s your company’s product against another companies’ product, it is good.

When competition is within your team, it is not so good. Things go wrong, and things become less than productive. Team Members are so busy trying to sabotage and undermine each other they forget the reason they were all brought together in the first place – to make things happen. The best teams work together with common goals and objectives to be productive.

It’s sort of a 3 musketeer approach: “One for All and All for One”.

A common goal that is well understood is the best way to start a project. It brings clarity to the project team members at the beginning of the project. In reality we start projects were ideas are not fully developed, there are competing goals and there is outright confusion as to why the project team is even in the room in the first place.

What if a project started with a clear goal in mind? Maybe even the business value was well understood too. How about this example:

We are undertaking the consolidation of the Filbert, Dogbert and Wally CRM systems into a single CRM system because the contact center is having difficulty getting a true picture of where a customer is within the sales cycle. We need to establish a scoring system for potential customers in order to focus our contact center agents on customers who are more likely to purchase our products. This will reduce marketing costs by 50%, reduce call length times by 20% and improve our contact center agent’s ability to service our potential customers in an expedited manner. Additionally, our contact center agents will be able to see all potential and current customers in one system and avoid having to switch between multiple systems to locate a customer.

Does the paragraph above sound like a good goal? It’s pretty good because it does contain the problem statement and the business value in one paragraph. It tells a story about why the team is together. It’s also short enough to ramble off in a hallway conversation with an executive. Focus on getting a common goal that is clear to the entire team. Don’t get caught up on explaining the scope in words – try thinking outside the box and use a context diagram or other type of diagram.

Remember a picture is worth a thousand words.

If the goal were stated as, “We are going to consolidate CRM systems.” It would cause more confusion that anything else. It does not answer the question “Why?” because the goal is not clearly understood the team will be confused immediately at the start of the project.

Hold on there cowboy! That goal sounds like a solution. Being specific about a goal can sound like a solution so care needs to be taken to avoid having a goal point to a specific solution. We need to be careful about how these goal statements are crafted to not sound like a solution.

A task list is not a goal. A common goal is more than a list of tasks to complete or items on a checklist. It is about the journey and the destination. How you get there and take your journey as a team is as important as arriving at the destination with the desired results. Productive teams get this and start their journey together by defining the journey. “Guys, HOW are we going to get there? Agile? Waterfall? Scrumban? Combinations of one or more?”.

Think about it a bit. You get assigned to a project and have that first meeting with the project team. Does the team have a conversation about the path the project will take? Does the question “How will we get there?” ever get answered? The conversation typically winds up being, “We will talk about that later when we have more details” or “We just follow the PMO process.” I have shown up to quite a few meetings where the project schedule and tasks were already determined – all without input from the team.

Milestones are not the path to success. They are just points along the journey. Keep in mind that when you reach a milestone successfully that your customers don’t say much about your success. “Wow this new 3 dimensional printer is so fast” or “Look at the stuff I can do with it”. No customer has ever said “Thankfully ABC company completed design on March 30th and moved into development using the waterfall methodology to build that new 3D printer.” Seriously I would break out a cold dead trout and slap them with it if that was said. The success here isn’t the fact there were deadlines – obviously there were deadlines and milestones – but rather the product experience by the customer.

Build the shared goal to start your projects off right. The concepts outlined in this article are a small part of Enterprise Analysis and building solid business cases for projects.

4 Things Every Healthy and Motivated Team Does

Written by Dmytro Moroz on . Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on 4 Things Every Healthy and Motivated Team Does

It is easy to forget this, but your team is the measure of your success. If your team is healthy, your business probably is too. So often we only look at the numbers.

Attracting and hiring brilliant people is already a big enough challenge, but what’s harder is keeping your employees. Gone are the days of money as the strongest tool for employee retention. In a study by American Psychological Association, 51% of surveyed people stated that their team is one of the factors that keep them in their job and 56% said they stay because they feel connected to the organization.

However, how can one keep their team engaged, linked to the organization and easily keep it healthy? Somebody once said: every happy team resembles one another, every unhappy team is unhappy in its way. So here are the simple secrets of happiness that successful teams share.

1. Empower by Collecting Feedback

Spend time with the people you manage to collect direct feedback from them. It is usually from the individuals in the trenches who deal with the faults of the systems and processes where you can gather your best feedback. Let your employees know they do have their say in how things operate in the company. Create the atmosphere of trust and when you start receiving constructive criticism, take it seriously and act on it. If more than two months have gone by without a one-on-one meeting with one of your employees, you are doing something wrong.

Acting on the feedback directly and in a positive way will continue to help you build trust with your team. Follow-up with team members on the feedback they provided you and provide a status. Great ideas will come from team members, but only if you show that you are taking their feedback seriously.

Retrospectives or project close meetings are additional ways of gathering up the good, bad and confusing things that are happening on your team. They are a little bit more formal in nature but gather up good ideas and strategies for future projects. What is lost most often however is the follow through on making sure the ideas are acted upon. Spending an hour in a meeting generating ideas but not having any of them acted upon can be a morale buster for your team. Retrospectives and project close meetings can generate a ton of ideas. You will need to have the team prioritize which ideas are the best. Create a top 5 to 10 improvement ideas list. Don’t lose the rest of the ideas or throw them away. Your team members spent significant time writing those ideas so show them their ideas have value by keeping them around and referring to them from time to time.

2. Track and Celebrate Successes

Simple, right? No matter how much we talk about it, it will not make a difference until you start doing it. Teach yourself to pay attention to and recognize small victories your staff accomplishes every day. In fact, just saying “I have noticed you have improved in this” when you mean it can do miracles to your team’s sense of encouragement. If you do not do it, you will incur a lot of management debt and end up losing someone valuable.

Milestones and goals can also help in tracking success. Set dates where major deliverables or end dates for phases. Track those dates visibly and publicly. Don’t hide them from your team’s sight. When your team accomplishes those milestones or goals, make a point to update the list to show the milestone or achieved the goal. Celebrate the success!

Celebrations do not need to involve a marching band, confetti, and champagne. They can be very simple. For individual contributions, a simple handwritten thank you note or card hand delivered is a nice touch. Shooting off the email does not have much value when your team member gets a thousand emails every day. For team successes handing out a small token of your appreciation in a team meeting is a great way to show your team appreciation. Don’t have anything else on the agenda. Set aside the time and focus on saying “Thank You” thoughtfully and meaningfully. Although food and money are big motivators, it does not have to be part of the celebration. Look them in the eye and say “Thank You.” That will always leave a long lasting impression than a doughnut.

3. Eliminate Waste from Meetings to Reports

No, I am not suggesting you ditch meetings and reports altogether. However, is it sensible to keep people in a 3-hour meeting just to say something you could communicate in a few lines over email? Split up lengthy meetings into daily standups to avoid data overload and typical meeting drag bottlenecks. When it comes to reporting, just choose a set of clear and relevant metrics and automate the generation of their recurring reports – easy!

Think in terms of minimally viable. What is the least amount of work needed to produce the biggest results? Approach this carefully, some deliverables are required for legal or regulatory reasons. Other deliverables help in clearly communicating with other teams. It may not be cutting the deliverable out entirely but rather looking at a different approach to presenting the deliverable. Having a design walk through with the quality team might just reduce the need for significant amounts of design documents. Always ask your colleagues and partners what information they need to be successful and then figure out how to deliver it as efficiently as possible.

4. Promote Personal Development

No matter how great and motivated a person is, unless they grow, their enthusiasm will slowly fade away. Give your people opportunity to grow both within their field and beyond. Send them to appropriate seminars and professional conferences. Start giving bonus remuneration to those who read books or take online courses and share this knowledge with their team. Investing in your staff will make them invested in their career and your team.

Often we tend to think of formalized training as a way of career development but attending conferences like Business Analyst World or Project Summit gives your team the chance to interact with others in their field to gain perspectives on how another approach the problems you are having at your organization. Give some homework to the attendees of a conference. Tell them to network with 5-10 other conference goers on your top 5 issues and get their perspective. It is amazing to see the ideas the come back from the conference.

Letter from the Editor – Building Better Relationships & Teams

Written by Paul Crosby on . Posted in Articles. 1 Comment on Letter from the Editor – Building Better Relationships & Teams

It is February, and I am online ordering flowers for Valentine’s day and making dinner reservations for my spouse of 26 years.

This year I am dedicated to staying out of the dog house and not to forget – again. However, other than being a month for spectacular greeting card sales, the editorial team and I thought we would look at helping you improve the relationships you have with your project team, colleagues, and co-workers.

This month we kick off a new webinar and whitepaper by Bob “the BA” Prentiss. Bob is presenting “Crucial Conversations: How to Effectively Discuss What Matters Most.” This webinar looks at when to have that all-important conversation, how to prepare for it, and how to deliver a not quite so easy crucial conversation. If you missed it at the BA World and Project Summit conference last year, now is your chance to view this webinar from one of the highest ranked speakers on the conference circuit.

Gregg Brown returns to write “How to Get to an Agreement When You Disagree” following up on his keynote presentations at the BA World and Project Summit conference last year. Gregg’s practical and thoughtful advice makes for a great article on why individuals and organizations disagree and how to gain agreement in a more positive way. Check out the video at the end of his article for more insight into gaining agreement.

Every week in February will be talking about handling competitive behaviors that lead to team disruption, the different types of conflict and how to manage them, and more articles on building better relationships within your organization and project teams.

As part of building better relationships, everyone here on the editorial staff would love to hear your feedback on how we are doing to deliver the great content you have come to expect.

Stay tuned – we have a few surprises along the way for you I hope you will enjoy with great articles, thought-provoking white papers and educational webinars. Let’s take a journey together on building better relationships and teams for greater success in 2017!

Chat Soon

5 Trends in Business Analysis, Project Management, and Agile for 2017

Written by Elizabeth Larson on . Posted in Articles.

Since 2009 we have enjoyed reflecting on what’s happened the previous year on projects and making predictions for the upcoming year. To summarize the `trends” we saw in 2016:

  • Emergence of the Business Relationship Manager (BRM) to maximize value
  • Agile successes, challenges, and use beyond software
  • Trends in business analysis and project management certifications
  • Implications of a changing workforce

Here are five industry trends we see happening for 2017. We’ve added two brief bonus trends at the end of the article.

1. Business analysis as a focal point for scaling Agile

Many organizations are delighted with the results produced on Agile projects, but are struggling with its application on large, complex projects, as well as its adoption enterprise-wide. Many of the discussions focus on which Agile framework works best for scaling Agile. Some of the common frameworks often discussed are scrum of scrums, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), and Nexus.

  • Large, complex projects. While there is a great deal of contention about which framework is “best,” there seems to be an agreement that there is a need for coordination, integration, and communication among Agile teams related to the solution being developed. Regardless of the title of the person doing this work, it is business analysis work. And it’s work that has always been needed on large, integrated projects—the coordination of dependencies, security, business and technical impacts, and version control.
  • Enterprise-wide Agile. Many large organizations have adopted Agile in a hodgepodge of ways, and these different areas have become quite fond of doing Agile “their” way. Adopting Agile across the enterprise will require skills of people not only familiar with Agile, but also with understanding the Agile current state and working with stakeholders to reach consensus on a unified future Agile state. This will involve being able to influence, resolve conflict, and to think both creatively and critically—skills well suited to experienced BAs.

2. Digital Transformation: Profound Change for Business Analysis…or is it?

The “digital transformation” movement means we must change the way we handle business analysis and requirements. Or does it? Consider two trends commonly mentioned today.

  • Cloud Computing. Security is a bigger concern when storing data in the cloud than if it is on-site under “lock and key.” Considerations for recovering data must be employed over and above normal backup and restore. Access rights are also more complicated than with traditional applications.
  • Mobile apps. Mobile applications provide data for sensitive banking, investment, or insurance applications. Security is a bigger concern on mobile devices given they are, well, mobile. It is much easier for a thief to access a bank account from a mobile device than a desktop. Modern apps need to have “mobile responsive” features and usability.

What we conclude is that these two technical trends will continue to affect business analysis. The trend, though, is not so much with functional requirements as it is with non-functional requirements (NFRs). The two examples above feature important NFRs including security, accessibility, recoverability, and usability, including user experience. NFRs are traditional aspects of business analysis, and any profound effect on it is that we will need to pay even greater attention to them with digital transformation.

3. Freelance BAs and PMs in the Gig Economy

Currently 40% of the US workforce is part of the Gig or on-demand economy1 and that number is growing. Intuit breaks this on-demand economy into 5 groups.2 We describe these groups below and briefly discuss how they apply to the project manager (PM) and business analyst (BA). Here are the 5 groups:

  • Side Giggers (26%). These are PMs and BAs who want to supplement their existing income. Examples include PMs and BAs who take vacation, days without pay, or who work off-hours to do training classes or short-term consulting gigs.
  • Business builders (22%). BAs and PMs who are tired of working for others and want to be their own bosses fall into this category. Many of these will create their own companies and hire others. We can expect these companies to be based on the owners’ experience in project management and business analysis. Examples include consulting and training companies.
  • Career freelancers (20%). These PMs and BAs love their work, love working independently, and want to use their skills to build their careers, not to build a company that hires others. These folks usually establish themselves as independent contractors with their small own company, usually an LLC.
  • Substituters (18%). PMs and BAs who want to work in the gig economy temporarily. Whether laid off from their former organizations or for other reasons they view “gig” work as temporary while they look for full-time employment.
  • Passionistas (14%). PMs and BAs who love what they do and are primarily motivated by their desire for greater flexibility than is usually provided by a more traditional organization.

4. The shifting sands of the BA and PM roles

Many project professionals find their roles changing so rapidly that it feels like the earth is shifting below their feet. Roles are being combined (BA and PM or BA and QA) or being torn apart (formerly hybrid PM/BAs are now full-time PMs or BAs). In some organizations BAs thrive on Agile projects working hand-in-hand with product owners (POs), while in others become part of the development team doing testing because there are no BAs,. PMs become scrum masters as do BAs. Sometimes the BA becomes a product owner, but one without the authority to make decisions.

In addition, both BAs and PMs are working strategically, doing business cases and recommending enterprise-wide solutions. And more and more organizations recognize the importance of the business relationship manager (BRM), to maximize value and help set the strategic agenda.

So what is the trend? For the foreseeable future, roles and titles will vary widely from organization to organization. Equally certain is that both project management and business analysis work, both strategic and tactical, have always been required and will always be needed, regardless of the role or the title or the role.

5. Generalists helping teams to self-organize

If descriptions of job openings are an indication, specialization seems to have wide appeal. But breadth of capabilities will continue to provide the flexibility that organizations need to respond to the hyper pace of change. BAs who code. Engineers who do project management. It’s the number of arrows in the team members’ quivers that defines an organization’s competitiveness – and contributes to the team’s ability to self-organize. Not only do organizations need self-organizing teams, but the teams themselves also need the flexibility to pick up tasks that are ready to go, so the more diverse the team members’ skills, the more work can be done in parallel and completed sooner.

Although varied work appeals to many younger workers, this isn’t just about attracting millennial talent. Self-organizing teams provide the structure organizations need in order to react quickly. Self-organizing teams and the ability of team members to wear multiple hats and get things done as they see fit will continue to become the best way for organizations to respond to external influences. The self-organizing team is not a new thing, but it is going to increasingly become the norm.

Two bonus trends

  • Short business cases and quick value. The trend is to provide business cases on slices of the initiative, slices that can bring quick value to the organization, rather than spending weeks or months detailing out costs and benefits and a return on investment showing a multi-year payback.
  • Dev Ops3 This trend relates to the first and fourth trends, scaling Agile and the shifting project roles. BAs and PMs now find themselves participating as DevOps Engineers on Agile teams that emphasize collaboration not just between the customer and development team, but also among such areas as development, operations, security, infrastructure, integration, etc.

Footnotes:
1 Forbes, January, 2016
2 Intuit Investor Relations, February 3, 2016, http://investors.intuit.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2016/The-Five-Faces-of-the-On-Demand-Economy/default.aspx
3 Dev Ops is “a cross-disciplinary community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale.” https://theagileadmin.com/what-is-devops/. Ernest Mueller, Aug 2, 2010 – Last Revised Dec 7, 2016. He attributes this definition to Jez Humble.

About the Authors

About the Authors

Elizabeth Larson, PMP, CBAP, CSM, PMI-PBA is Co-Principal and CEO of Watermark Learning and has over 30 years of experience in project management and business analysis. Elizabeth’s speaking history includes repeat presentations for national and international conferences on five continents.

Elizabeth has co-authored five books on business analysis and certification preparation. She has also co-authored chapters published in four separate books. Elizabeth was a lead author on several standards including the PMBOK® Guide, BABOK® Guide, and PMI’s Business Analysis for Practitioners – A Practice Guide.

Richard Larson, PMP, CBAP, PMI-PBA, President and Founder of Watermark Learning, is a successful entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in business analysis, project management, training, and consulting. He has presented workshops and seminars on business analysis and project management topics to over 10,000 participants on five different continents.

Rich loves to combine industry best practices with a practical approach and has contributed to those practices through numerous speaking sessions around the world. He has also worked on the BA Body of Knowledge versions 1.6-3.0, the PMI BA Practice Guide, and the PM Body of Knowledge, 4th edition. He and his wife Elizabeth Larson have co-authored five books on business analysis and certification preparation.

Andrea Brockmeier, PMP, CSM, PMI-ACP, is the Director of Project Management at Watermark Learning. She has 20+ years of experience in project management and related practice and training. She writes and teaches courses in project management, business analysis, and influencing skills. She has long been involved with the PMI® chapter in Minnesota where she is a member of the certification team. She has a master’s degree in cultural anthropology and is particularly interested in the cultural aspects of team development, as well as the impact of social media and new technologies on organizations and projects.