How many months does it take the average team to reach high performance? The best way to lower time-to-maturity for future new teams is to fix mobilizations.
Mobilizations are hard. They have a number of elements that have to land on time together to work well. Just a few big ones:
- Staffing plan:
- Deciding the headcount, roles, skillsets, and sources of team members (vendor, FTE, etc)
- Identifying and onboarding all developers, plus product leader and facilitator
- Onboarding: Hardware, software, licenses, logins, and other equipment
- Kickoff: Meeting with all team members, stakeholders, and leaders involved to charter the team, begin formation, introduce them to their leaders and stakeholders, and share the economic context of the team’s mission
- Handing off team members’ responsibilities to others so they can focus on their new mandate
- Mobilization Meetings:
- Icebreakers and team events to help the team “gel” in its first crucial weeks
- Training in systems, way of working, product context, customer experience, etc.
- Ideation about solution design, work breakdown, and possible paths to a minimum viable product
- Creation of a working agreement about how the team communicates, solves problems and does administrative housekeeping.
Most of my clients fumble these steps and fall into these common but disastrous traps:
- Messing up the staffing plan:
- Staffing the initiative only with vendors, who don’t understand your customer, strategy, or values and will there sit around waiting to be told what to do until given clear orders in exactly the way they’re used to
- Composing a “team” from the managers of the people doing the work, not the people themselves
- Messing up onboarding:
- Requesting software, hardware, licenses, offices, etc. too late
- Inadequate access and equipment, making team members dependent on other people to get basic tasks done
- Messing up the Kickoff:
- Signaling unrealistic expectations
- Micromanaging the team before they’ve had a chance to self-organize
- Signaling non-alignment between leaders and stakeholders
- Failure to handoff team members’ previous duties to other people, thus doubling their workload and splitting their focus
- Under-investing in mobilization:
- Mobilizing remotely, resulting in low attendance, disengagement, and failure to accomplish the outcomes above
- Insufficient time allocated to mobilization, rushing or skipping many of the outcomes above.
These mistakes are so common as to be almost the default, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Team mobilization can be planned intentionally, templatized for easy repetition, and continuously improved.
