So you think your company is doing, "Very nicely thank you”? You get things right 99% of the time and are delivering shareholder returns above 5%. Not too bad then? Well maybe? But it could be a whole lot better!! You are operating at a level of around 3-Sigma. Research has shown that you are possibly consuming up to 25% of your gross revenue with the 1% you are getting wrong. If you were to move to become a 6-sigma level company, you would reduce the lost revenue to below 5%. That’s an extra 20% that you could add straight to your profits. What would your shareholders think of you then?
Read more here
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
I Heard It Through The Grapevine - Mark Rewhorn & Prabh Grewal
Fresh article posted on TreQna....
I Heard It Through The Grapevine
Mark Rewhorn & Prabh Grewal
The importance of communications within an organisation
All organisations rely on accurate and swift communications in order to maintain the basic organisational infrastructure. It is these communication channels that facilitate the coherent and focussed direction of the organisation and enable it to meet its desired goals and objectives. Should these communication channels breakdown, the organisation rapidly descends into a disorganised chaos. It is communication that creates the social glue which keeps the organisation together. Communication represents the very essence of the organisation; it is a key process underlying all aspects of the organisation and its operations. Sadly, it is also one process that is very often mismanaged.
It is also worth mentioning that the more transparent the communication system is, the easier it becomes to manage the workforce and deliver operational excellence. Often, the aspects of employee motivation and pride in the organisation are overlooked; experience has shown that a transparent communication process is key to the success of these two factors....
To read on Click Here
It's Been a While
Been a while since i wrote in this here blog...and seems like i can hardly get around to it these days...
anyways been busy with the site (treqna) will be back in a few hours for more...
anyways been busy with the site (treqna) will be back in a few hours for more...
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Working With Teams
Objective: The objective of this post is to capture the suggestions to effectively work with teams, and achieve project objectives. These suggestions are generic in nature and maybe applied to team work in general.
1. “Getting to know your team” - This may sound elementary, but in my experience this is one of the critical and crucial aspects of effectively working with a team. As a project / team lead it is important for you to know your individual team members, understand their mental frame work and thinking preferences. You would over time eventually discover that each member of your team has different abilities, motivations, and personalities. For example you might have some team members whose thinking preferences strongly lean towards visualizing and conceptualizing in other words are very creative by nature, however when it comes to implementation and execution of these ideas they fail miserably, on the other hand you might have people who may not be very creative but have strong abilities in implementing solutions. As a project lead if you are able to determine the thinking preferences of your team it would enable you to effectively work towards achieving your project goals, by assigning roles and responsibilities as per core competencies and work on your teams areas of opportunities.
2. “Handling Personalities in Your Team”- Once you have learned to classify your team members as per their various personalities / thinking preferences, it is also important for you to learn how to deal with them effectively to meet your stated objectives. As mentioned above you might have a variety personalities in your team, we discuss shortly below the most common kind of personalities that you might encounter and how to deal with them:
· The Optimist / Enthusiast – People who are optimists by nature are the most fun to work with, they invariably manage to see the positive side of every negative situation. However they often tend to leap at ideas without giving due weight age to the ideas merits / de-merits in other words they sometimes have the tendency to overlook the cons of an idea / thought. As a project lead you need to often guide them via meaningful discussions to think through an idea completely from all perspectives. Given their nature this should not prove to be difficult.
· The Bully / Aggressor – This is a type of personality that you are bound to come across more often than any other. Aggressive personalities can influence attitude and team productivity. These kinds of people generally tend to intimidate, interrupt and interrogate other team members thus often creating an unpleasant atmosphere. Many a times this kind of a person is unaware of the effect his attitude and general body language has on the other people. As a project lead you can use his aggressive tendencies in a positive fashion by coaching / guiding him to channel his aggressive qualities towards achieving your project goals rather than towards his team members. Adopting an aggressive attitude towards your goals and adopting an assertive rather than aggressive attitude towards team members gives you just the right mix of qualities in this person to groom him as a future leader. Another way with dealing with such kind of people is to stay fact focused by doing this you can avoid intangibles like opinions and feelings. During discussions find common area’s of understanding on issues you both agree with and then start discussing areas on which there is disagreement doing this will put this person at ease and will lead to a more conducive and meaningful debate.
· The Creative Team Member – People with a creative bent of mind are essential to any team, these people are the ones who have the ability to think out of the box and more often than not suggest possible solutions to deadlocks or obstacles, they are good at conceptualizing, and however often they are not very adept at implementing their own ideas. You can utilize the creative people in your team along with people who are process oriented i.e. people with good implementation skills to achieve your objectives.
· The Introvert – You would also at times encounter people who can bring a lot of value to the table, however are introverts / shy by nature. Try to make such people as comfortable as possible, always address them directly and let them know that their inputs are recognized and valued. It takes time for such people to open up and start contributing so be patient with them and over time you will get some pretty good results from such people.
· Logic Driven and thoroughly process oriented Team Member – The logic driven or in other words a thoroughly process oriented team member would generally be the one to give your implementation a logical conclusion, he has high focus levels, see’s things only in Black and White, is sometimes logical to a fault. He should be the one to give your team a realistic direction. People with his tendencies seldom get carried away by new ideas, during brainstorming sessions it is essential that this member of your team does not shoot down ideas or creative thinking, once the session is done involve him in evaluating and discussing ideas to get a feel of the feasibility and practicality of implementing them.
3. “Clearly Define Your Goals / Objectives” - Visualize the following scenario, the project team meets for the kick off meeting, the project lead gives a talk on the project and the goals they want to achieve. At the end of the speech the project lead invites questions (most of the times there are none) the meeting winds up without the team members fully understanding the scope / objectives of the project. The work continues the team gets bogged down trying to chase several different perceived objectives and goals and due to this the project overshoots the budget and timelines and is ultimately shelved and we have what we call a headless chicken situation. To avoid this have a clearly defined mission statement (preferably in writing) or as some organizations call it a “vision”, in other words the mission statement should capture things like “what are we trying to achieve?”, “what is the scope of the project?” One way to do this is to discuss this with your team take everybody’s inputs and thoughts on their understanding of the project objectives and then frame your mission statement, for your project to succeed it is important that your team believes in this statement else the statement just becomes a few words on a piece of paper and ceases to be of any use. An effectively written mission statement can provide common direction and motivate your team to achieve the same as a cohesive unit.
4. “Keep Track on Your Project” – At the kick-off, define an overview of needed actions (Milestones). Make a time-line and assign responsible persons to the several activities, needed to finalize the project. Schedule a meeting every week (or twice for complex and/or dynamic projects). “Keep-an-eye” on delays and problems, solve them immediately with active participation of your team members by asking: “I know you’re saying it’s impossible or this might be a problem, but please give your idea(s) to solve it, give alternatives or boundaries at which you think we can make it happen”. This is not implying that for every problem you’ve got to do a brainstorm or something like that, but it will make sense that everybody’s not thinking in problems, but in solutions. So my statement will be “Think in Solutions, not in Problems”
5. “Define Roles and Responsibilities” - Roles and responsibilities amongst your team must be clearly defined to enable them to work effectively, these roles can differ based on the type of project that you are undertaking, however there can be some roles which maybe common to any kind of project, these are as follows :
· Facilitator: - This is a person who calls for meeting, keeps people on tracks, minutes all the meetings, ensures that all activities are completed as per timelines and does follow-ups.
· Liaison Officer: - This is a person whose job it is to interact with other departments / functions which have a direct / indirect bearing on your project, he can also be used to communicate with departments who are going to get impacted due to your project.
· Project Manager: - And finally the Project Manager, he is the person who organizes the work plan and see’s that it gets implemented, depending upon the size and scope of your project you may have multiple Project Manager’s each being responsible for one part of the overall project.
6. Some tips to effectively manage Teams: - The following are some ideas on how to effectively manage team’s :
· Ensure the team is focused on the task, this can be done by reviewing progress on a daily or weekly basis as is applicable
· Encourage participation from all team members, especially from members of your team who are introverts by nature.
· Avoid any personal attacks on any of your team members, during discussions.
· Suggest alternate solutions / procedures when the team is stalled
· Stay neutral during discussions
· Accept and list down all ideas during a brainstorming session, no matter how irrelevant they might seem at the time, once all the ideas have been listed down discuss each idea and arrive at a common consensus to decide the merits /demerits of the same through further discussion.
· While giving feedback avoid any negative comments which might be taken as a comment on that individual rather than on his work. For e.g., I have often seen that the minute one use’s the word “you” people tend to get defensive, instead it is always a good idea to use phrases like “I don’t understand”, or “I believe that we can do it better this way “, or “Can you help me understand why …..”. Giving a positive note to your feedback would help you achieve more than by being aggressive. One more trick while giving feedback is to first talk about the +ves of the member in question and then discuss his areas of opportunities (never call them weakness’).
· Recognize and Reward good work done by your team members, this not only motivates the particular individual but also encourages the rest to perform better.
· Mixing fun with work can also act as a motivation and morale booster for your team, for e.g. you might decide to conduct a team session once in a while at a comfortable and relaxed environment like a team members house or a offsite location, I have often noticed that a relaxed environment works wonders for the team motivation and also gets you some good creative ideas. One philosophy that we have implemented successfully here to motivate people is called the Fish philosophy the four basic tenets of the FISH philosophy are as follows:
1. Play – Have a little fun at work (WORK THAT”S FUN GETS DONE)
2. Make their Day – GO. M.A.D (Make a difference) engage others make them part of the fun.
3. Be there – Actually pay attention, to make sure you take care of the person in front of you right now.
4. Choose you’re Attitude – Before you go to work everyday pick out an attititude.
We implemented this philosophy for one of our sales process’ which was not achieving client performance S.L.A ‘s due to motivation and lack of team work issues, post the implementation today they have been consistently achieving all targets for the last 6 months.
The above are just some of the inputs / ideas based on my experiences with working with teams (both operational as well as project teams), though these are just basic ideas they often get overlooked by Managers and Project leads when under pressure to deliver and meet deadlines.
Hope you found these usefull. In the event you wish to add to this or comment please feel free to do so .....
1. “Getting to know your team” - This may sound elementary, but in my experience this is one of the critical and crucial aspects of effectively working with a team. As a project / team lead it is important for you to know your individual team members, understand their mental frame work and thinking preferences. You would over time eventually discover that each member of your team has different abilities, motivations, and personalities. For example you might have some team members whose thinking preferences strongly lean towards visualizing and conceptualizing in other words are very creative by nature, however when it comes to implementation and execution of these ideas they fail miserably, on the other hand you might have people who may not be very creative but have strong abilities in implementing solutions. As a project lead if you are able to determine the thinking preferences of your team it would enable you to effectively work towards achieving your project goals, by assigning roles and responsibilities as per core competencies and work on your teams areas of opportunities.
2. “Handling Personalities in Your Team”- Once you have learned to classify your team members as per their various personalities / thinking preferences, it is also important for you to learn how to deal with them effectively to meet your stated objectives. As mentioned above you might have a variety personalities in your team, we discuss shortly below the most common kind of personalities that you might encounter and how to deal with them:
· The Optimist / Enthusiast – People who are optimists by nature are the most fun to work with, they invariably manage to see the positive side of every negative situation. However they often tend to leap at ideas without giving due weight age to the ideas merits / de-merits in other words they sometimes have the tendency to overlook the cons of an idea / thought. As a project lead you need to often guide them via meaningful discussions to think through an idea completely from all perspectives. Given their nature this should not prove to be difficult.
· The Bully / Aggressor – This is a type of personality that you are bound to come across more often than any other. Aggressive personalities can influence attitude and team productivity. These kinds of people generally tend to intimidate, interrupt and interrogate other team members thus often creating an unpleasant atmosphere. Many a times this kind of a person is unaware of the effect his attitude and general body language has on the other people. As a project lead you can use his aggressive tendencies in a positive fashion by coaching / guiding him to channel his aggressive qualities towards achieving your project goals rather than towards his team members. Adopting an aggressive attitude towards your goals and adopting an assertive rather than aggressive attitude towards team members gives you just the right mix of qualities in this person to groom him as a future leader. Another way with dealing with such kind of people is to stay fact focused by doing this you can avoid intangibles like opinions and feelings. During discussions find common area’s of understanding on issues you both agree with and then start discussing areas on which there is disagreement doing this will put this person at ease and will lead to a more conducive and meaningful debate.
· The Creative Team Member – People with a creative bent of mind are essential to any team, these people are the ones who have the ability to think out of the box and more often than not suggest possible solutions to deadlocks or obstacles, they are good at conceptualizing, and however often they are not very adept at implementing their own ideas. You can utilize the creative people in your team along with people who are process oriented i.e. people with good implementation skills to achieve your objectives.
· The Introvert – You would also at times encounter people who can bring a lot of value to the table, however are introverts / shy by nature. Try to make such people as comfortable as possible, always address them directly and let them know that their inputs are recognized and valued. It takes time for such people to open up and start contributing so be patient with them and over time you will get some pretty good results from such people.
· Logic Driven and thoroughly process oriented Team Member – The logic driven or in other words a thoroughly process oriented team member would generally be the one to give your implementation a logical conclusion, he has high focus levels, see’s things only in Black and White, is sometimes logical to a fault. He should be the one to give your team a realistic direction. People with his tendencies seldom get carried away by new ideas, during brainstorming sessions it is essential that this member of your team does not shoot down ideas or creative thinking, once the session is done involve him in evaluating and discussing ideas to get a feel of the feasibility and practicality of implementing them.
3. “Clearly Define Your Goals / Objectives” - Visualize the following scenario, the project team meets for the kick off meeting, the project lead gives a talk on the project and the goals they want to achieve. At the end of the speech the project lead invites questions (most of the times there are none) the meeting winds up without the team members fully understanding the scope / objectives of the project. The work continues the team gets bogged down trying to chase several different perceived objectives and goals and due to this the project overshoots the budget and timelines and is ultimately shelved and we have what we call a headless chicken situation. To avoid this have a clearly defined mission statement (preferably in writing) or as some organizations call it a “vision”, in other words the mission statement should capture things like “what are we trying to achieve?”, “what is the scope of the project?” One way to do this is to discuss this with your team take everybody’s inputs and thoughts on their understanding of the project objectives and then frame your mission statement, for your project to succeed it is important that your team believes in this statement else the statement just becomes a few words on a piece of paper and ceases to be of any use. An effectively written mission statement can provide common direction and motivate your team to achieve the same as a cohesive unit.
4. “Keep Track on Your Project” – At the kick-off, define an overview of needed actions (Milestones). Make a time-line and assign responsible persons to the several activities, needed to finalize the project. Schedule a meeting every week (or twice for complex and/or dynamic projects). “Keep-an-eye” on delays and problems, solve them immediately with active participation of your team members by asking: “I know you’re saying it’s impossible or this might be a problem, but please give your idea(s) to solve it, give alternatives or boundaries at which you think we can make it happen”. This is not implying that for every problem you’ve got to do a brainstorm or something like that, but it will make sense that everybody’s not thinking in problems, but in solutions. So my statement will be “Think in Solutions, not in Problems”
5. “Define Roles and Responsibilities” - Roles and responsibilities amongst your team must be clearly defined to enable them to work effectively, these roles can differ based on the type of project that you are undertaking, however there can be some roles which maybe common to any kind of project, these are as follows :
· Facilitator: - This is a person who calls for meeting, keeps people on tracks, minutes all the meetings, ensures that all activities are completed as per timelines and does follow-ups.
· Liaison Officer: - This is a person whose job it is to interact with other departments / functions which have a direct / indirect bearing on your project, he can also be used to communicate with departments who are going to get impacted due to your project.
· Project Manager: - And finally the Project Manager, he is the person who organizes the work plan and see’s that it gets implemented, depending upon the size and scope of your project you may have multiple Project Manager’s each being responsible for one part of the overall project.
6. Some tips to effectively manage Teams: - The following are some ideas on how to effectively manage team’s :
· Ensure the team is focused on the task, this can be done by reviewing progress on a daily or weekly basis as is applicable
· Encourage participation from all team members, especially from members of your team who are introverts by nature.
· Avoid any personal attacks on any of your team members, during discussions.
· Suggest alternate solutions / procedures when the team is stalled
· Stay neutral during discussions
· Accept and list down all ideas during a brainstorming session, no matter how irrelevant they might seem at the time, once all the ideas have been listed down discuss each idea and arrive at a common consensus to decide the merits /demerits of the same through further discussion.
· While giving feedback avoid any negative comments which might be taken as a comment on that individual rather than on his work. For e.g., I have often seen that the minute one use’s the word “you” people tend to get defensive, instead it is always a good idea to use phrases like “I don’t understand”, or “I believe that we can do it better this way “, or “Can you help me understand why …..”. Giving a positive note to your feedback would help you achieve more than by being aggressive. One more trick while giving feedback is to first talk about the +ves of the member in question and then discuss his areas of opportunities (never call them weakness’).
· Recognize and Reward good work done by your team members, this not only motivates the particular individual but also encourages the rest to perform better.
· Mixing fun with work can also act as a motivation and morale booster for your team, for e.g. you might decide to conduct a team session once in a while at a comfortable and relaxed environment like a team members house or a offsite location, I have often noticed that a relaxed environment works wonders for the team motivation and also gets you some good creative ideas. One philosophy that we have implemented successfully here to motivate people is called the Fish philosophy the four basic tenets of the FISH philosophy are as follows:
1. Play – Have a little fun at work (WORK THAT”S FUN GETS DONE)
2. Make their Day – GO. M.A.D (Make a difference) engage others make them part of the fun.
3. Be there – Actually pay attention, to make sure you take care of the person in front of you right now.
4. Choose you’re Attitude – Before you go to work everyday pick out an attititude.
We implemented this philosophy for one of our sales process’ which was not achieving client performance S.L.A ‘s due to motivation and lack of team work issues, post the implementation today they have been consistently achieving all targets for the last 6 months.
The above are just some of the inputs / ideas based on my experiences with working with teams (both operational as well as project teams), though these are just basic ideas they often get overlooked by Managers and Project leads when under pressure to deliver and meet deadlines.
Hope you found these usefull. In the event you wish to add to this or comment please feel free to do so .....
Quality Newsletter @ Treqna
Well its been a while since i updated this blog...During this time a lot has happened....but we will not go into that at present...in the meantime i wanted to take time out to mention that a Quality newsletter has now become a regular feature at www.Treqna .com for those interested...just follow the link :)
http://www.treqna.com/index.php?ind=blog&op=home&idu=10152
http://www.treqna.com/index.php?ind=blog&op=home&idu=10152
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Motivation - The Pygmillion Effect
Well today we talk about something called the "Pygmalion Effect". In short the "Pygmalion effect argues that your expectations of performance from people directly reflects the performance they give you. which is to say that if you have high expectations from a person he invariably delivers high performance, but if your expectations are low from a person he invariably will deliver lower performance. Many a times we subtly convey our expectations from people in various ways and means which can have an impact on that persons productivity. One most common mechanism to convey expectations is the quality of the work you delegate to your people, if you consistently delegate routine and less challenging work to your team member you are subtly communicating your expectation levels to that person, over time this can impact the team member negatively instead of helping him improve he further deteriorates and feels undervalued and untrusted.
In a nutshell you need to identify and set expectations from your team members which should drive them to improve and exceed their capabilities. One way to do this in my experience is to consistently raise your expectations of performance from your team and communicate the same to them time and again, keep re-iterating the fact that they can do better than what they have been doing, help them identify and work on their areas of oppurtunity and with each improvement raise the bar of performance expected.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Interesting Article on Six Sigma Deployment
Well found another well written article on Six Sigma Deployement. Per the author some of the key factors in a successfull Six Sigma Deployment though not limited to are as under :-
Six Sigma Deployment
Cheer and have fun
- Leadership Commitment
- Usage of Six Sigma Language across the org
- Goals that induce Process re-engineering
- Innovation
- Data driven Decision Making.
Six Sigma Deployment
Cheer and have fun
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