Making your idea reality
The need for speed in the fast-moving dot-com economy is resulting in more and more emphasis on cross functional teams to get things done, which ultimately results in a growing need for project management skills. If you find yourself leading such a team, here are some considerations you’ll want to make at critical junctures:
At the outset.
• Get management commitment. Agree to lead a cross-functional team only when you have upper management’s commitment that they will get involved and stay involved. Although it might never happen in your company, assigning a project to a cross functional team in some companies can be a way of getting rid of an unwanted problem and making sure someone else takes the fall for being unable to solve it.
• Prioritize communication. Plan regular reporting mechanisms—preferably face to face briefings—with your upper management sponsor. If you find an unwilling audience, cut the project short.
• Negotiate for the best team members possible. Team members should be "stars" in their own parts of the organization, and thoroughgoing experts and team players who understand your role as a team leader/peer. Make sure you have the authority to change team members if necessary.
• Negotiate for other resources. You will also need a budget, space, equipment, and more. Don’t begin the work until you are sure you have the right tools.
• Commit only to realistic results. It is always better to under-promise and over-deliver.
• Improve skills. Look at this project as a way to improve your management and leadership skills. You will need to be a coach, a cheerleader, a role model, a mediator, a taskmaster—sometimes all at once.
• Contemplate implementation. Start thinking from the outset about implementation, and make sure you either involve or inform anyone who could sabotage the effort. Also, think about where you want to go after the project is over and build or maintain the relationship paths that you need to get there.
During the process.
• Get used to working with uncertainty. Provide for clarifying everyone’s assumptions, gathering facts, experimenting to test the assumptions, and calling “time out” if things start to go south.
• View your team as a group of change agents. Change agents need to feel an early success, so establish incremental plans that allow them to see small, quick successes along the way to the larger, more distant ones. They also need to know that you are there for them, regardless. When there is a win, share it. When there is a setback, share that as well.
• Encourage fun and creativity. Support imaginative approaches to getting the facts as well as brainstorming. Make sure that mistakes are learning opportunities, not the kiss of death.
• Control attitudes. Try to mitigate the inevitable we-they attitudes that spring up between your team and the larger organization. Help team members keep perspective as they enjoy being exposed to a new and broader perspective than they were “back home” on the old job.
• Require milestones and regular progress reports. These can be a way to keep tabs on performance.
At the end.
• Celebrate. When the report is written, the results are reported, and the new processes are tried and institutionalized, have a celebration at which to honor each team member for a particular contribution.
• Send thanks. Send team members back to their old jobs with thank-you letters to their supervisors that document their contributions, along with an executive summary of the results of the project. Also, send thank-you letters to others in the organization who were supportive along the way.
• Discuss results. Sit down with your boss, discuss your “lessons learned”, and thank him or her for the opportunity to accomplish this task.
• Follow up. Follow up on the “relationship path” mentioned above for your next assignment.
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