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Building a high performance team... so where do you start?

 

Where you start really depends on your organisation, specifically the businesses general maturity through a governance and process leadership lens.

Why is that important? Because good governance and good process structure provide a solid foundation for everything else you need to work on. 

 

I will give you an example. I was pulled into an inflight project for a client. A mid-sized business that was looking to implement an internally developed solution. To uphold client confidentiality I won’t share deeper details.   

 

The client was in the early stages of their growth curve, was successful and looking for diversification opportunities. The end game was to create a solution that solved an internal problem then productize and sell the solution to others. They failed to do so.

They had partnered with a small development house to deliver this solution. The project was not scoped properly, the development partners were not well managed. As a result, the delivery was behind schedule and the outcomes to date were not fit for purpose. 

I was brought in to pick the project up, brush it off and put it back on its feet. By this stage there had been a reasonably large level of spend relative to progress. 

 

So how did they get there? Good governance practices would have delivered a different outcome. If the scope of the product was better defined, scope creep would have been easier to spot and manage. If a robust risk assessment was part of the developer selection process, the partners selected may not have been chosen. If the ‘want’ by the business to commercialise the solution was fully costed, with market analysis, the development path may have been very different. 

 

So how does this relate to building high performance teams, I hear you say! Without clear direction and good controls, the work environment can be very challenging and confusing for those tasked with delivery. 

 

If the solution, as you understand it, keeps changing, what are you building and are you meeting the needs of the organisation? In many cases the answer is ‘no’, and the delivery team becomes disillusioned and disconnected from the business. Enthusiasm is fast replaced with frustration.

 

So to resolve this particular issue, I took the time to ‘manage up’, implementing (largely by stealth) good governance practices around the product. This enabled conversations around scope, which led on to commercial viability. This resulted in a narrowing of the scope and related spend. I applied a risk perspective to the developer relationship, which resulted in the termination of that relationship, replaced by a more substantial partner. 

 

We delivered the internal solution without monetizing it as the ‘new’ governance model identified the concept was not commercially viable for this organization.

 

The pre-work above provided a stable platform to deliver from. The team could now move forward confidently. The solution was delivered.

 

Governance and process maturity of the organisation is one of the cornerstones of building high performance teams. If it does exist, embrace it. If it doesn’t exist, build it. I will reach into the details around this but that is another story for another day.