Tag: Team

Unsticking Your Team’s Potential

Written by Rebecca Schalm on May 25, 2010. Posted in Articles.

The ‘team’ is probably the most complex and irritating relationship in an organization.

As individuals, we seem to be able to work with most people one-on-one, perhaps in groups of threes, and also as an entity of hundreds and even thousands. Where we struggle most is when there is a medium-sized group of us clustered together in a room, meeting once a month, with the purpose of, at least theoretically, doing something together.

Teams have the most trouble when there is a power differential (i.e., there is an appointed leader), and when their purpose is more strategic than operational (i.e., they make decisions vs. work on products). Most advice to teams is aimed at the leader, and what he or she can do to build a better team. Below are three membership dysfunctions that can get in the way of team effectiveness and suggestions on how team members themselves can help.

1) Team members believe the problem with the way the group is working (or rather, not working) is someone else’s fault.

Let me be clear on this point: responsibility for effective team functioning and dynamics sits squarely with the leader. However, he or she does not bear the responsibility alone. Each and every person who sits around the table is responsible for how they contribute to the dynamic. I sometimes ask people ‘what is one thing you could do differently that would help the team work together more effectively?’ and then throw up my hands in despair when I get a blank stare. The way a team member can make the team experience more positive is to reflect, answer that question, and then set about making a personal change in how they interact with their peers and leader.

2) Team members expect their leader to manage the team in a way that is consistent with the way they personally prefer to be led.

Those who want to be consulted and have decisions emerge through participative consensus-making have a difficult time with a team leader who manages in a more decisive and directive way. Team members who like direction, structure, and discipline have a tough time with leaders whose style is relaxed, opinion-seeking and open-ended.

A solution to this problem is to relax your expectations that your boss will always adjust his or her style to accommodate your preferences. While some leaders are adept at understanding and adapting to the needs of the group and the situation, not all are. The problem becomes more complex when you stop and realize everyone sitting around the table prefers something a little bit different: there is no way to make everyone happy all at the same time. Recognizing this and your leader’s limitations (and strengths) can help to elicit more empathy, and perhaps motivate you to adjust and temper your own expectations.

3) Team members expect their peers to defer to them as experts on functional issues and regard them as smarter than average on everything else.

One of the most common complaints I hear from people is that no one asks their opinion or listens when they offer it. The trouble is I hear this from every member of the team, suggesting that not only are they not being heard, they are also not listening to others.

There are two ways to address this problem. The first is to spend more time talking to each other one-on-one so you have time to fully express yourself, get a reaction from others, and evolve your thinking before you tackle the entire team with your good ideas.

The second is to be prudent around what opinions you express, how, and when. Does the team really need your personal opinion on everything? Is your input so different or so critical that it will change the direction of the conversation? Is it core to the issue or just an interesting aside? The more relevant and poignant your input, the more likely people are to stop and listen.

Teams are as unique as individual relationships. Sometimes they work like magic. Sometimes they stumble along clumsily. Most shift back and forth between these extremes. It should always be our goal to lead an effective team when we are in the position to do so. And it should always be our goal to be a member of an effective team when we are not.

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Dr. Rebecca Schalm, who has a Ph.D in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, is Human Resources columnist with Troy Media Corporation and a practice leader with RHR International Company, a company that offers psychology related services for organizations worldwide.

Six Steps to a Strategic Situation Analysis with SWOT

Written by Cynthia Low on May 4, 2010. Posted in Articles.

Creating a Company Strategy: The Challenge

Jack, a new senior vice president, had been tasked with preparing a situation analysis report that senior management would use to help form company strategy. Since Jack had never contributed to company strategy before, he reviewed his predecessor’s analysis. He discovered that the previous year’s report did not capture the information that senior management would need, nor did it include a way to present that information in a manner that management could use to create a clear strategy. Additionally, the analysis did not reflect his team’s capabilities or ideas.

It became apparent to Jack that his predecessor hadn’t used the situation analysis report as an opportunity to create a collaborative exercise that involved all the team members. This explained something else he had observed when he had taken over: his team didn’t know anything about the previous situation analysis and had no idea how it had contributed to the company’s strategy. Not surprisingly, his team felt disconnected from the company’s current strategy and goals.

Assessing the Situation

Jack realized the necessity of acquiring tools to elicit and articulate his team’s contributions and also present them effectively to management, otherwise it was unlikely that his input would be incorporated into the company’s strategic plans. Without that input, Jack’s team would lack the focus, commitment and buy-in essential to the success of any strategic overhaul. And, if the process didn’t motivate and energize his subordinates, involvement in preparing the report would be viewed as one more task imposed on them that would negatively impact their day-to-day responsibilities.

The Solution: The Six-Step SWOT Analysis

The team adopted the SWOT Analysis framework as part of a series of collaborative work sessions that would effectively prepare their current situation analysis report. SWOT analysis is a strategic planning method used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats involved in a project or business venture, indicating where opportunities and risk should be pursued, where certain threats or risks should be avoided, and if resources are allocated properly. With my help, Jack implemented the following six-step process:

Step 1. Organize Teams of Four to Six Individuals

Once the teams are divided, designate a facilitation team that will be responsible for orchestrating the multiple meetings of the other teams, including coordinating the logistics (meeting rooms, pens, flip charts, etc.) for the meetings.

Step 2. Provide Pre-work to Prepare the Participants

Create detailed event information and send the package to meeting participants in advance. Include listings of all the meetings, agendas for each of those meetings, and the purpose and objectives of the process. Recommend document sources that staff can use to augment their individual thoughts on internal and external factors influencing the business (e.g., analyst observations on industry environment, reports on macroeconomic conditions, market segmentation data, internal performance metrics). Ask participants to group key factors under categories that you provide (e.g., resources, competencies, managerial deficiencies, inadequately skilled resources). This prompts the participants to identify broader categories that specific factors fall into.

Step 3. Conduct Round-robin Meetings to Collect Input on Internal Factors

A facilitator for each team will ask each participant to provide a list of internal factors. Write the internal factors on individual sticky notes or 3×5 cards and place them so they are displayed clearly. Group the factors that enhance the company’s situation under Strengths and those that weaken the situation and competitive position under Weaknesses. Facilitate a discussion that generates more factors, deepens understandings of the factors and uncovers relationships between them. Record the results of these discussions on the related notes or cards.

Step 4. Conduct Round-robin Meetings to Collect Ideas on External Factors

Have the teams repeat the round-robin exercise looking at external factors. Group these under the headings of Threats and Opportunities. Threats are those factors that are possibly detrimental to the organization’s competitive position in the marketplace; opportunities are factors that enhance the company’s position. Make it clear that some factors can appear on more than one list. For example, an opportunity can also be interpreted as a threat (if, for example, the opportunity is seized by a competitor).

Step 5. Vote on Top Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats and Opportunities

Collate the lists from the individual teams and put them in a central location where all of the teams can review them. Schedule a time for participants to vote on the top three strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Step 6. Prioritize Strategic Alternatives

Have the teams brainstorm, using the “top three” lists created in the previous steps. For each opportunity, have participants identify the company’s relevant strengths and weaknesses. Repeat the process for each threat, identifying the strengths that the company can use to defend itself from the threats and the weaknesses that leave the company exposed. When the company has corresponding strengths and few weaknesses, this opportunity should be pursued vigorously. On the other hand, the company should consider exiting those areas where it has many threats and many weaknesses (especially if the threats target the company’s weaknesses). Where it makes sense for the company to stay in threatened areas, the teams should recommend how existing strengths can be redeployed or acquired. Where there are opportunities worth pursuing, but the company lacks strengths, recommendations can be prepared that include partnering with other organizations or acquiring the necessary skills or resources through other means.

Final Assessment

Jack personally orchestrated the process, setting up a series of half-day work sessions that involved his direct reports and several members of the functional areas reporting to him. He had the groups use SWOT analysis as a key job aid in their work sessions, supported by facilitators who understood the process. Jack also brought in outside facilitators to elicit objective opinions and discussions.

The teams, which in previous years dreaded the paperwork demanded in creating a situation analysis, were now energized by the interactive work sessions. Furthermore, they left the meetings feeling their ideas would be used in the strategic plan that the corporation adopted and that any resulting strategy was going to be their strategy. They weren’t disappointed, either. Because the resulting report summarized key factors and tied them directly to strategic alternatives, the document had a significant impact on the development of the company’s strategic plan.

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Ramana Metlapalli is author of Learning Tree Course 252, “Strategic Planning for Organizational Success”. Ramana specializes in advising high-technology companies on their strategic initiatives. Learning Tree International is a world leader in hands-on training for Management and Technology Professionals. Since 1974, over two million course participants from over 65,000 organizations around the world have enhanced their skills through intensive hands-on exercises under the guidance of expert instructors with real-world experience. Visit us at www.learningtree.ca.

Managing Risk the Tour de France Way

Written by Paul Mulvey on April 27, 2010. Posted in Articles.

It’s the third mountain stage in the Tour de France (TdF). A few riders are in the lead as they wind their way up a mountain. The number of riders in the lead group starts dwindling – 12, 10, then 8. All of a sudden, around a hairpin bend, Jan Ullrich weaves across the road accelerating, pulling away from the pack. What will Lance Armstrong do? Chances are good that the US Postal team has thought about this risk and planned for it. This means that Armstrong will know exactly what to when Ullrich pulls this move, and the team has responded to many other risks up to this point to get Armstrong in the lead group.

Before I “race” into what Armstrong does and how the TdF teams manage risk, I figure that I should discuss risk analysis. Risk Analysis is technique 9.24 in the BABOK v2.0 that you should become familiar with. If you’re not familiar with risk analysis, this is the article for you.

A risk is an uncertain event or occurrence that can have a negative or positive effect on the project team’s ability to achieve an objective.

How do you plan for uncertain events? Through creation of a risk management plan!

The risk management plan includes a list of the possible risks that you may face during the project. You should create this at the beginning of the project, and update it as the project progresses. Each risk should include a description of the risk, the likelihood that a particular risk will occur and its impact, and how the team is going to respond to the risk should the risk become reality. Now because risks are really uncertain events, and uncertainty is just, well, uncertain, you can’t possibly plan for every risk so concentrate on those that are more likely. For instance, if one of your stakeholders suggests that you hold your requirements workshops in the building’s new outdoor garden courtyard, a reasonable risk would be that it might rain forcing cancelation of the workshop; while pieces of Skylab falling out of the sky would not.

Another thing that you need to include in the plan is your team’s Risk Tolerance. This is how much risk can be tolerated, and it may be different at different points in the project. Tolerance levels are: Risk Averse – will seek to reduce negative risks and accepts reduction in potential benefits in return for a more certain outcome; Risk Neutral – the benefit of the risk response must outweigh the “costs”; and Risk Seeking – willing to accept high risks in order to maximize chances of success.

Let’s look at the relationship between probability and impact. Suppose that we come up with a risk that it might rain on the day of our requirements workshop. The probability would be the chance that it would rain. The impact could be high or low depending on the availability of a tent or shelter. Our response could be different depending on how we plan to respond. For instance, we might avoid (hire a company to erect tents in the courtyard), accept (oh, well, we’ll just get wet), or mitigate (negotiate with the stakeholder to host the meeting in the company boardroom instead to lessen the chance of the impact). How do you determine probability? Look at the weather report, or if it’s too far into the future, look at the region. If you’re in Seattle, rain probability is High – Arizona? Low.

At this point, you have a list of events that may occur such as the table below.

Risk	Probability	Impact	Trigger	Response
It may rain during the outdoor workshop	High	Low	Begins raining	Avoid – we will erect tents in the courtyard garden large enough to house all meeting participants

So how does all this risk management work in the Tour de France?

The TdF is a grueling 2,000 mile + stage race, with twenty teams and 10 riders per team. It takes place over three weeks in July, and the winner is the one with the lowest overall time across multiple individual day races (called stages). Very simple objective – tough to get there.

Each team has examined its own strengths and weaknesses, so they have their own way of approaching the risks that present themselves in the race (you have performed a SWOT analysis, haven’t you?). Let’s look at one team’s stage one risk management plan. No one has started racing yet, so there is no leader. It’s a flat stage so there will be a mass sprint at the end. Your team does not have a great sprinter (your team’s weakness), so you probably are going to consider yourself risk-averse at this point. You don’t want your riders to risk getting caught up in a big crash at the end, ruining those cyclists on your team that are really good in the mountain stages (your strength). So, let’s create a risk. The risk is that your team will likely not win this stage. The probability that this will happen is high because you don’t have a strong sprinter. The impact is low because in this stage, riders will only be seconds apart instead of minutes or hours, and that time will be easily gained in the mountain stages. Your strategy is then to accept the risk. There is no real effort to try and win this stage because you are going to win in the mountains with your climbers.

So, now we’re into week two of the TdF and in the mountains. Armstrong is in first place overall, but there are some challengers who are within striking distance and could challenge him for the yellow jersey (what the overall leader wears in the race). Lance also put in a very fast climb yesterday so he has a two-minute advantage over second place. Will we be risk averse or seek risks in today’s race? Generally, the strategy would probably be neutral – protect the yellow jersey and only attack if the opportunity presented itself. Let’s list some of the risks that may be on this day’s risk management plan.

Risk	Probability	Impact	Trigger	Response
Jan Ullrich attacks	High	High	Ullrich accelerates on a climb	Mitigate – Armstrong will hang on Ullrich’s wheel, making Ullrich do the work but will not let Ullrich gain time.
Stephane Heulot attacks on the mountain stage	High	Low	Heulot accelerates or breaks away on a climb	Accept – Heulot is 45 minutes behind Armstrong in overall time and will not be able to gain that much time on the climb. Armstrong will not win the stage, but will not lose the overall classification. Armstrong will let Heulot get away.
Richard Virenque attacks	High	Medium	Virenque attacks on a climb	Exploit – Virenque is an excellent climber, and if Armstrong can force Virenque into the attacking position, Armstrong can ride on his wheel, making him do more of the work while Armstrong still retains the lead in the overall classification.

These are just some of the risks that the race team managers and the riders face every day. They plan for some of these uncertain events and react based on the response that they have planned out. How can you use the lessons from the TdF on your projects?

Follow these three steps:

Think about what uncertain events might arise within your project. Write them down. These are your risks. For instance, one stakeholder would like to hold the requirements workshops in the company’s new garden courtyard. A risk may be that it might rain during those sessions.
For each one of those uncertain events (risks), determine what the likelihood is that each one will materialize and then the impact of that. In Seattle, WA, raining on outdoor events is a higher priority than it is in Phoenix, AZ.
Determine what will trigger the realization of the risk (how you know that it’s happening), and how you will respond when it occurs. This is your risk response. For instance, if the rain starts, that will trigger your risk response. You then know exactly how your team is going to respond because you have thought it out ahead of time.

Remember, BAs should perform risk analysis because not everything will go as planned. By developing appropriate responses, you are effectively planning for some of those situations that may not go as you expected. You will be able to keep the project moving in order to accomplish your objectives and not stumble or stall because the team doesn’t know what to do.

So what did Armstrong do when Ullrich attacked? Armstrong accelerated right along with him. He knew the risk that Ullrich posed, but instead of thinking about his response, it was calculated and thought out that morning with the team director. But don’t worry about Armstrong coming into your company and taking over your job as a BA just yet – he’s training for this year’s TdF showdown with Alberto Contador.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below

Paul Mulvey, CBAP, is a Lead Business Systems Analyst at UPS. He currently rides a Merlin road bike and runs a 53/39 up front and an 11-21 in the back, although with that ratio, the climbs seem to get harder each year. He can be reached at [email protected].

Embracing Agility – Your Best Bet for Business Analysis Skill Development!

Written by Robert Galen on April 20, 2010. Posted in Articles.

If you’ve been reading my blog entries at all this year, you’ve realized that I’m fairly enthusiastic about the agile methods. I think one of the most misunderstood aspects of agility and the methods themselves relates to their nature. You know, they’re really not methodologies. Certainly not in the same sense as heavily documented Waterfall and its variants or RUP or Spiral or any other traditional methodology.

Instead, I liken them more to Lean and other improvement oriented thinking tools and approaches than a specific methodology. They also gather concepts and patterns from historical software development practices that seem to work well , e.g, unit testing, continuous integration, refactoring, and pair-programming. That’s why I almost always hear the following from my students in my classes: “So that’s agile. I’ve been doing much of that for most of my career. It seems that the packaging is the key…and the mindset.”

I find myself universally agreeing with the students’ perception. It’s about a mindset that transcends “agility” and leads towards outstanding performance and growth as a technologist. Let’s explore some aspects of that…

Self-Directed, Empowered, and Accountable Teams

If you get the chance to join an agile team as a BA, jump on it. It will give you a chance to operate as a true, collaborative team member. Leadership opportunities will surface and you’ll get plenty of opportunities to show off your chops in a very visible venue. High performance is what matters in these teams, and low performers can’t “hide” from the team. It draws out excellence.

In these teams words, written or otherwise, mean very little. What counts is delivering on commitments with working, demonstrable software. It’s about real delivery! Not in hours worked, but in raw productivity and creative solutions to the teams’ problems.

Focus on Quality and Improvement

As part of their career evolution, BAs need to become much more “quality literate”. Dive deeply into understanding the techniques for building in quality, for example reviews and inspections. What are the business cases behind them? The pay me now vs. later trade-offs in software and begin to challenge poor decision-making.

Partner with the testers. They are often underestimated and underutilized within most teams. Yet, effective testing is as challenging a technical exercise as architecting or modeling any software system. Dive-in and test the software with a wide-variety of manual techniques, and learn how to test effectively. Even jump-in and do some simple automation. It will give you yet another perspective in your journey!

And when you attend retrospectives, have the fortitude to engage your team on continuous improvement. Call them out on the practices that need improvement and, during each iteration, demand focus on those improvements. Then celebrate each and every improvement!

Transparency and Feedback

There is tremendous power in making all of our project dynamics totally transparent to everyone. First, it takes courage to “tell it like it is”. It also opens the door for feedback from all perspectives. That old notion of not raising issues without solutions doesn’t hold any longer. We’d rather get early visibility into the issues so the entire team can engage in solutions.

And don’t get defensive. If you get confronted on a mistake, take the time to explain the context and thinking processes behind your decisions. Be open to corrective action discussions without appearing defensive. In fact, become more comfortable with failure. Failure is good in agile teams; we simply want to fail early, small, and catch it quickly. This leads towards the necessary adjustments to get things “back on track”.

Generalist Mindset

I’ve seen so many software development roles (programmers, architects, testers, BAs, project managers, etc) take a very narrow view towards their roles and their work. Very often they create a narrow silo of responsibility that they ‘own’ and everything outside of that is “someone else’s’ job”. That often extends to their knowledge as well. They might only understand one narrow slice of their applications and not have a broader brush view.

In agile teams this view is highly discouraged. Not so much by management, but by the very definition of a self-directed team trying to meet their goals and objectives. The broader your view, the more flexibly you can operate within your team and deliver the goods. Oh and by the way, the more valuable you become!

Wrap-up

Don’t let anybody tell you that agile teams are easy. They are not! To me they’re sort of a Boot Camp for personal growth and improvement. They provide opportunities for becoming more open-minded and trying new approaches. They also provide opportunities for thinking outside your traditional box and roles. If you’ve got the courage and persistence to truly want to improve, agility will provide you with incredibly diverse opportunities to learn, be recognized, and advance!

That is…if you embrace It!

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That Business Analyst ‘Secret Sauce’

Written by Marsha Williams on April 6, 2010. Posted in Articles.

The practice of business analysis is only 30 years old but already we have mature methodologies, best practices, certification, tools, terminology, competencies. Our craft is in excellent shape!

But then there’s the age-old BA question, the one that always surfaces regardless of the context: what have we overlooked?

Today’s answer is the individual attributes of each and every BA. Just as no two baseball pitchers (starters, closers, southpaws) are identical, neither are any two BAs.

This article talks about why it’s worth delving into the preferences and dispositions of individual BAs; how this contributes to excellence in the work and the product (both when assigning the work, and when ‘framing’ an assignment for a specific individual); the boost to employee engagement and retention that comes from paying close attention to individual BAs, and finally, how to implement these discoveries and benefits in your BA team … or for yourself in your solo BA practice.

Let’s look first at a typical team with the names changed to protect the innocent as well as the guilty (the latter would be the author). We have a team lead, Ms. Matchmaker (the author again) and four intermediate BAs, Mr. Melody, Ms. Connector, Mr. Clock and Ms. Fixit.

Over time, as suggested by the names, we’ve discovered a few things about each other.

Ms Matchmaker likes to know what’s going on everywhere and who’s involved in it, so she can connect the dots on short notice. Mr. Melody steps in whenever we run into a ragged process or a situation where there is no process at all. Mr. Clock always has his eye on the finish line and the calendar. Ms. Connector is the first to notice and nudge if anything we’re doing is similar (or contradictory) to something going on elsewhere in the organization. Ms. Fixit positively glows whenever she encounters a good mess, one that needs to be cleaned up, structured and prevented from happening again. Ever!

Later we’ll talk about how we discovered these attributes in our team members. But first…

Why Should We Care?

When new work comes towards our team, we try (when we have the luxury) to assign it to the team member whose disposition is the best fit.

Example: we were recently asked to take on the support and maintenance of a new application from …ummm…an overly agile development project. The application was not well documented, there was no support structure in place for incident, problem and change management, the technical environments were less than robust and there was no governance. This work went to Ms. Fixit, who gathered the team and worked calmly and efficiently through all the issues until the application was safely installed in our

portfolio of well managed services. Mr. Melody provided QA throughout the transition process, and as a result of his work we ended up with a template and a checklist for a standardized transition process going forward. Bonus!

Another example: a few months before she was due to retire, one of our business owners let us know that she had a secret stash of ad hoc reports that only she understood but that executive relied on, and she hoped that we would be able to redevelop these reports, document the meta data and get them implemented in a production environment before she was gone. The reports had been built using SAS (not our standard tool) and no one on our team had SAS experience. Our reports analyst was new and not yet familiar with our old clunky unsupported suite of reporting tools. But, our reports analyst happened to be Mr. Clock, and with both feet on the gas pedal he managed to get those reports implemented three days before our user’s retirement party. The bonus in this venture was that Mr. Clock, backed up by Ms. Matchmaker who had been paying attention to trends in the world of reporting, was able to advocate for and implement a new reporting environment after this project was completed.

Another Thing

Often, we don’t have the luxury of assigning the work to the person for whom it’s the best fit. Availability is the deciding factor. Then what?

Then it’s even more worthwhile knowing our BA’s dispositions and tendencies. The truth is most projects possess most attributes – there is always an element of time, process and integration. We’ve discovered that if we highlight the attribute that particularly appeals to a team member, the person will be much more productively engaged than if we describe the initiative in terms that do not ‘grab’. (To the same degree that Mr. Clock is attracted by a deadline, some of our other team members are repelled).

‘Framing’ is Important

For instance, last year Ms. Connector was assigned the tedious job of collecting our division’s quarterly performance measures. But because the work was ‘framed’ in terms of decision support for executive, Ms. Connector dug in enthusiastically and was eventually acknowledged for having gone ‘above and beyond.’ By the time she was done she had ensured that all our performance measures integrated with measures from other divisions across the organization. Furthermore, like Ms. Fixit, she was supported by Mr. Melody in the development of a repeatable process that has made subsequent rounds of performance measure collection much less mundane.

Anything Else?

It’s fitting that it’s Mr. Melody who makes this case for a team where the members know their own and each others’ strengths so well.

“A good team”, he says, “is like a symphony orchestra. You need to have a variety of instruments – basses and tubas as well as pianos and violins. You need to appreciate them all and give them their right roles. If you do that, the orchestra goes from good to great. Our team is great and that’s a big part of the reason why.”

It’s worth noting that in a recent re-organization where some team members might have been able to latch onto interesting opportunities in other areas, the members of this team all expressed a preference for staying where they are and staying together.

Uncovering the Strengths and Preferences on Your team. Or in Yourself

The Personal Crest Exercise

Materials needed. Magazines to be cut up (lots of variety), scissors, glue, marker pens, crayons, a large heavy sheet of blank paper for each participant.

Develop the crest. Participants are given 20 – 30 minutes to work quietly on their own crest using whatever supplies and techniques they wish (good to provide some examples from previous sessions that are not too intimidating or ‘artistic’)

SecretSauce1

Share the crests: participants are given 5 minutes each to speak about whatever elements of their crest they wish. Afterwards, crests are posted in a communal area.

The team we’ve been talking about had the good fortune to come together a few years ago when recruiting was competitive and employee retention was a major focus in the organization. As a result, the team had no trouble getting management approval for some overhead ‘bonding’ time in early days.

The intimacy of a team charter day that included a few facilitated exercises like the Personal Crest Exercise (inset below) went a long way towards revealing the team members to themselves and to each other.

A discovery tool that has been used effectively in many organizations is the The Clifton Strengthsfinder 2.0. This inexpensive standardized test (a copy of the book and a single access to an online test costs about $30) is based on the notion that each of us is wise to identify and apply our top five or 10 strengths because these strengths will form the basis of our best ongoing contribution. This methodology also says – in contrast to development models of the past – that we should avoid devoting ‘more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths’. Amen to that.

Meyers Briggs testing is another popular and readily available tool for discovering individual attributes.

Whatever techniques we use, there’s a pay off to knowing ourselves and our team mates well: the reward is a happy team using their best individual skills, supporting and appreciating each other and delivering really good work.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below

Marsha Williams is a Senior Business Analyst and Team Lead in the Shared Services division of the Public Service of British Columbia. Marsha’s three passions in her professional life are: knowing the people and their strengths and assisting them to use those strengths for their own sake and for the sake of the organization; always digging deeper to determine what work really needs to be done and what creative approach will best enable good results; writing whatever needs to be written so we know where we came from, where we are and where we’re going. Marsha can be reached at [email protected]