What This Book Is About
This book is about the organizational structures that define and enable productive teams. For more context-setting read the brief first chapter titled The Third Skill Set.
What This Book Is
This book is a simple summary of some of the ideas and sug- gestions we have communicated in blog posts, presentations and in other ways over the past year or so.
What this Book Is Not
This book is not a textbook. It does not cover the topic of team- work exhaustively. Rather, it is a high-level combination of some core concepts in an easy format.
This book is also not a manual for project management, depart- ment management or running a committee. There are stan- dards and methodologies for those activities that will combine well with this book’s suggestions.
Who This Book Is For
Our goal in collecting these ideas in one place is to help teams think through ways of self-organizing.
It may also be a useful read for people who have an oversight role by virtue of being a part of a PMO (Project Management Of- fice), acting as a functional manager or in another way influenc- ing multiple teams.
This book is written to help all teams, from agile to formal. How- ever, larger teams and teams in larger companies have greater need for the structural support that is the subject of this book due to their more complex environment.
What To Expect
Each chapter of this book is broken into brief sections. The sec- tions address one set of related thoughts. Sections are inten- tionally short. Each chapter should take just a few minutes.
We offer suggestions or questions for you to think about. In each case we explain the reasoning. We do not attempt to pin down the details because there are many differences between organizations. Instead we provide you with a jumping off point that will help you consider new approaches or confirm your own thinking.
This book does not provide many citations or suggestions for future reading. But to be sure, the vast majority of the content is derived from well-regarded sources in the literature on team- work we can't claim to have invented most of this material.
Instead of a blizzard of citations, we keep it simple. We do pro- vide a few links to articles on the MetaTeam blog. Many of these posts contain links to more background information.
Teamwork is a subject that has been well covered by a great number of fine writers and textbooks. If what we offer here inter- ests you, you will easily find much more information on the topic starting from a simple web search.
An Overview Of the Contents
We will look at how teams operate in a progression that basi- cally tracks the stages of setting up a team. The order we chose is:
• Membership
• Goal setting
• Roles, responsibilities and tasks
• Decision-making
• Communications and cooperation
This ordering roughly follows the concept of the hierarchy of team needs, often referred to as GRPI, that we will look at in chapter three.
Section 3
Introducing
MetaTeam
In This Section
1. About Altova
2. Why We Offer This Book
3. What Is MetaTeam?
4. Is MetaTeam Required?
5. Where Can I Learn More?
About Altova
Altova GmbH is a software products company based in Vienna
Austria and Beverly Massachusetts, in the United States.
The company was founded in the early 1990s and is best known for its market leading XMLSpy development environ- ment. More recently Altova has become well-known for data management and business intelligence. Altova entered the pro- ject and team management area with the release of its MetaTeam online service.
Why We Offer This Book
Altova is a software products company. We created this book to compliment one of our products, MetaTeam.
Altova is not in the business of consulting to companies on teamwork. But we do have a strong interest in helping compa- nies organize teams well and run successful projects.
This book highlights the structural foundations of good team- work. MetaTeam implements these concepts in an accessible, consistent and practical way. We want to encourage you to take a look.
What Is MetaTeam?
MetaTeam is an online service offered by Altova. It is a tool for self-organizing teams that want to be more effective.
MetaTeam integrates elements of
• Collaborative Decision-making
• Team Performance Management
• Project Management
These structural elements of teamwork are well-known and in- clude practices that are widely advocated. However, they have not been integrated in a single software product before now.
Part of our job here is to help teams understand how MetaTeam implements some of the best ideas from these three areas, and how MetaTeam can help them be more successful.
Is MetaTeam Required?
In short, no.
This book is not a guide to using MetaTeam. Every idea and suggestion in this book may be easily applied with MetaTeam. But you can also implement these ideas in other ways.
In a very few places we mention MetaTeam by way of illustra- tion. In these cases we endeavor to make the illustration clear to people who have not used MetaTeam.
We believe MetaTeam is the best way for teams to organize themselves. However, we recognize that creative people may find their own approaches.
Where Can I Learn More?
You can learn about MetaTeam on the Altova website. In addi- tion, you can find examples of using MetaTeam in the MetaTeam Blog.
To try out MetaTeam sign up for a MetaTeam account here.
Then login to experiment, learn and apply MetaTeam at your own pace.
The MetaTeam login page at http://metateam.net.
The Third Skillset
Identifies a type of straightforward and well- known best practices which fill the space between soft skills and hard skills
Section 1
The Third Skillset
In This Section
1. Management Vs. Leadership
2. Soft Skills, Hard Skills
3. What Is The 3rd Skill Set?
Management Vs. Leadership
In a now familiar quote, Peter Drucker said “Management is do- ing things right; leadership is doing the right things”.
Before the right things can turn out right you have to know how to do things right. It is a natural learning progression.
Doing the right things wrong won't get you anywhere. Period.
Whereas, sometimes in doing the “wrong” things right you have at least the chance to compete effectively with your peers in other companies.
That may not sound inspiring. But consider, the vast majority of companies essentially compete on execution, not grand vision.
In this book we talk about doing the simplest team organization things right. We leave visionary leadership to specialists in that complex topic.
Soft Skills, Hard Skills
Project Managers and other team leaders often ask the question: what is more important soft skills or hard skills. In the usual case a lively discussion follows.
For the present purposes let's say that soft skills are interpersonal relationship oriented abilities. Examples may include:
• Emotional Intelligence
• Negotiation and persuasion
• Difficult conversations
• Empathy
• And similar “intangibles”
In contrast, let's stipulate that hard skills, in the context of team efforts, include the capabilities most often associated with pro- ject and department managers. These include:
• Estimation techniques such as PERT and function point analy- sis
• Work tracking techniques like Earned Value
• Scheduling methods including Critical Path and Critical Chain
• Risk management tools like Monte Carlo simulation
• And similar “algorithmic” approaches to quantifiable problems
What Is The Third Skillset?
What is often left out, marginalized or mixed in with dissimilar skills is what can be called the Third Skill Set.
These are the organizational skills that structure a team for suc- cess. They may be applied with the softest touch or in a mechanical way more in keeping with a hard skill. These skills include:
• Team definition and operations
• Organization of goals, roles and processes
• Management by responsibility
• Communications and information management
• And similar well-known best practices
These are practices that can be followed as you would follow a recipe. Like a recipe you can decide to follow them by the book or with some improvisation, knowing that if you stay close to the instructions you are likely to achieve a good outcome.
This book is about the third skillset that structures and improves team operations. In the context of teamwork, these are what we feel are the “right things” Drucker refers to.
Section 2
A Map of the Road
A head Toolkit
In This Section
1. How Does It All Fit Together?
How Does It All Fit Together?
The contents of this book are a toolkit for teamwork. You should be able to reach in and grab the tool you need when you need it.
There is also a pattern to the use of these tools. The chapter on GRPI is the best reference. (GRPI stands for Goals, Roles, Processes and Interpersonal).
But for the visual thinkers, here is a view of the toolkit to help you see how the sections of this book group together.
You may notice that there are not specific chapters for each box in the processes area. The contents of this book offers lots of guidance in these topics. However, it does not attempt to be comprehensive. There will always be much more to explore and learn.
