Team Charter Template: Set Your Team Up For Success
Most of the Change Management work I do is centered around strategic projects. These projects always result in some change to the organization which is why I get involved. A reorganization of roles and responsibilities. A new system. A new business process. These projects also have teams tied to them and, in most cases, these teams cross functions, business units or both.
If I’ve worked with a client in the past, they will call me in to help setup the team and run the team kickoff meetings. In other cases, I get involved with clients at a point that teams are starting to struggle to deliver on the project. In almost every case, I ask to see the team charter for the project team. Sometimes a charter is in place and sometimes it is not. I’d say it’s about 50/50 in my experience.
Renew Staff Motivation in a Down Economy
Regardless of what Newsweek says, the recession is still affecting businesses and the people that make those businesses run. One of the challenges in this environment is dealing with the migration to what I call the “New Normal”. Basically, I’m talking about what a business or an organization looks and feels like after a change event. The change event in this case being a nasty recession.
Clients and colleagues have asked me about how to keep motivated in this New Normal. I built the following presentation as a starting point. The bulk of it relates to narrowing the gap between the confusion that follows a change and the New Normal that is the result. I call this a starting point because it is basically a front-end summary of a complete step-by-step guide called How to Motivate Employees to Do More With Less that I built for my CanChange site.
Team Kickoff Tool - Once and Done
A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about executing successful team kickoff meetings and events (see Team Kickoff Practices). In addition to the article, I thought it would be helpful to provide a tool that anyone can use to organize their Team Kickoffs. If you find yourself leading, organizing or participating in team-based work or projects, this will be helpful.
As always, please let me know what you think of the tool…
Team Kickoff Practices - A Little Help for Business Analysts
How Business Analysts Can Optimize Their Role in Facilitating Adaptive and Plan-driven Team Kick-off Activities
Start your team on the right foot whether your project uses an Agile or Plan-driven project method by ensuring that your team kick-off activities set accurate expectations and reinforce how you will work together. As the role of the Business Analyst begins to include more Project Management work, there are opportunities for Business Analysts to gain visibility and increase their business value within their organization.
Specifically, Business Analysts can take a larger role in designing and facilitating Team Kick-offs and Working Sessions, fostering productive collaboration between the business and the project team, and developing effective reliable relationships with subject matter experts. Often this work is called the “soft stuff” or the “soft side” of project work. The challenge most project professionals encounter is how to turn it into implementable work outcomes. This article focuses on the Business Analyst’s role in designing and facilitating Team Kick-offs and will provide specific techniques for Team Kick-offs employing adaptive or plan-driven project methodologies.
Practical Concepts and Practices for the Intermediate Change Practitioner
For those of you that are taking it up a notch in terms of change management and implementation delivery. This is for you.
Beyond Change Management: Advanced Strategies for Today’s Transformational Leaders
by Dean Anderson
This book was a great find in 2001 and is a gem now. I saw Linda Ackerman Andersen present at a National Change Management conference that year and she was excellent. Her presentation and this book (as well as its prequel), were some of the first books published for the Change Management Practitioner. In my opinion, the beginning of this millenium was the time when the writing in the Change Management field became less about theory and much more about “how to do it”.
I recommend this book to intermediate practitioners who have been a part of a change implementation team and to advanced practitioners who were too busy then to read a new perspective. The reader will need some exposure and experience in facilitating organizational dynamics to optimize their understanding. Good resource.