Empowering Teams

Empowering teams is a popular topic among managers and has been a common discussion among the agile community. Team empowerment is tied to many aspects of a successful team and project. Practice shows that empowering your team members leads to the following benefits:

• Increased Ownership
• Improved Moral
• Higher Quality
• Improved Return on Investment (ROI) for Projects
• Faster Delivery

As you can see in the Dilbert cartoon, implementation of empowered teams can be met with opposition and confusion. Even when management wants to create these empowered teams, they can struggle to figure out how to hand over the control, how much control to hand over, and accountability once the team is empowered. 

How To Transition

First, it is important to meet with the members in the organization and discuss the transition. This is important to ensure they understand what your working towards and why. Often times, training and team building exercises are used to to help drive this message home. Getting buy in from the teams is the most important piece because without it, they may not accept the responsibilities and power being given to them.

The second part of this discussion should include determining the boundaries of their empowerment. There are three common ways I see managers struggling with how to set these boundaries.

• Managers tell the team "it can decide how the budget will be used," but the manager must approve any spend. This is a poorly veiled attempt to create an illusion of control. The team feels they made a decision but really all of the control remained with the manager. This is the fastest way to stop the empowerment process. 
• Another common way that manager attempt to divide the control, is to act as a liaison to the business or customer rather than allowing the customer direct access to the team and vice versa.
• The final way I see work being divided is that the team can determine how the work is being executed, but the manager keeps control of what work is being executed. 

Although these policies may sound reasonable, every implementation of these policies that I have witnessed has resulted in issues in areas like: on time deliveries (waiting for a busy manager), transitioning, and team moral. As such, policies like these must be kept to a minimum in order for the team to truly take the responsibility that the management is trying to hand them.

Finally, once the team has been trained and the boundaries established, it is important to let the transition start immediately but remember even the change to the new model should be driven by the team, approaching the transition in the way the team feels most comfortable in.

Management of Empowered Teams

One of the most common issues I see in management of empowered teams is "meddling". Managers typically have two common concerns that leads to "meddling" in the project which undermines the empowerment of the team.

• The manager has a concern that the team will not for fill their obligations or they will exceed the timeline or budget provided to them.
• The manager is unsure of what his/her role would be if the control is handed over.

These concerns are legitimate in a traditional role, but when you empower teams you empower them to succeed or to fail. As such you need to give them the slack to come about the work in the way they see fit which may not align with your thoughts as a manager. To help a manager be more comfortable with this, there are reports and data that you can request on a regular basis. This data should be minimal and non impactful of the team. Think of raw data that you as the manager would then parse through and/or format to your liking. In agile this is most typically a list of committed stories at the start of a sprint and the burndown as the sprint progresses.

So what should the manager be doing if the team is empowered and self organizing?  Empowering teams is not easy and just like anything requires support and maintenance to keep it going once you have the team. As a manager of the empowered team, your role will shift to focus on the following:

• Removing roadblocks
• Mentoring team members
• Training and growth plans for team members
• Conflict resolution
• HR items
• Marketing team and output
• Removing non value added tasks from the team

Empowering teams may be a change from what organizations and managers are used to doing, but it is where companies need to move given the desire to flatten organizations and work in a more lean, team focused manner. 

Top 10 Activities for Project Managers

In today's world, project managers are responsible for an increasing number of things. While this shows progression in the career and growth of the project managers, we need to remember the core activities that project managers are accountable for. These activities are activities important to the success of the project and of the team, however I am increasing seeing organizations prioritize reporting, data gathering, and office politics over these critical activities.

1) Act as the Communication Hub
In my opinion, communication is the most important thing a project manager can do. As the communication hub, the project manager gathers all of the relevant project and team data together and parses through it to provide a concise and clear message to the team, stakeholders, and management. Dissemination of this information is up to the project manager and the organization, but the actions of the most skilled communicators are easily verified by asking any stakeholder, "how is project X doing?" If they have to pick up the phone and call the project manager, this area needs work.

2) Collect and Review Documentation
When it comes to documentation, let's ignore the discussion of valid and necessary documentation for this blog and rather say any documentation that has been deemed "required" is necessary for the project manager to collect into a central repository and review/confirm complete. This is to say the project manager is not responsible for the content, but rather the storage and existence of the document.  Often times, documentation is pushed to the sideline in favor of delivery, when this happens the project manager should track and ensure completion prior to completing the project.

3) Facilitate Meetings
Project managers are not necessary in every discussion that occurs on the team, but it is the project managers responsibility to facilitate the meetings. Facilitation is not simply taking notes, but rather prepping an agenda, ensuring the right audience, driving the teams to value adding conversations, and a little bit of note taking at the end. Why you ask, see item 1. When a team is not communicating effectively it may become necessary for the project manager to step in and force the communication. This may be in the form of daily standups or weekly status meetings. One of the best ways for a project manager to force communication is to put the team into a meeting and FACILITATE it. Proper facilitation will also drive shorter more effective meetings, but more on that some other time.

4) Lead the Team
Leading a project team is not always easy, but it is critical that the project manager not simply drive for tasks to be completed, but really lead the team forward.

5) Ensure Follow-ups are Done
Without this activity, things "fall between the cracks" and commitments don't get met. The project manager should track these actions and make them part of the project plan. Most of these types of follow-ups are

6) Resolve Conflict
Over a long enough project, you are bound to find conflict in the team and/or with management. The project manager should take an active role in reducing and resolving this conflict.

7) Look Out for Roadblocks and Issues
Part of our role should be to identify any broken, inefficient, or ineffective processes that we encounter in our day to day. These items cause a problem and potential delays in our projects. We may not always be able to correct the inefficiency but at the very least we should be documenting it in a lessons learned. However, when possible we should be driving for correction. After all, if it is a problem for you and your project it is a problem for someone else as well.

8) Process Improvement
Project managers are in a unique position to see processes that effect delivery of a project. Sometimes process changes seem benign but when applied at the project level, result in a significant impact to the project deliverables. As such, the project manager needs to advocate process improvements from this perspective.

9) Continually Look Ahead of the Team
As the project moves through execution, a critical part of the project manager is to remove roadblocks and impediments for the team. Looking ahead will allow the project manager to remove these roadblocks before the team gets there. Think of it like this: The team is a locomotive moving down the track. If you slow it down, it takes a lot of energy (brake power) to slow the team and then it takes a lot of energy to get the team moving again. So any work a project manager is doing before the team gets there, will go a long way in keeping the momentum.

10) Act as Marketing Department for the Team and Project
Bad news travels fast, good news (or team successes) can go unnoticed. Why is that? Because when something goes wrong, someone, typically management, has to get involved to provide corrective action, whereas a success required no additional work or action by management. The project manager needs to be in front of management, customers, and stakeholders championing the successes of the team and leading the celebrations. Doing this well, increases moral, teamwork, and leads to greater outputs in the future.

I would love to hear from everyone else, what are the top critical activities you want/need to see from project managers? Project managers, what are the things you do that you feel are the most valuable? Is anyone feeling the pressure to spend time on things like office politics instead of your project? What are the things and how do you handle the request?