What Are Some Objective Signs That Your Department/Organization/Team are Underdelivering? Transcript

Idris Manley:

Welcome to the Future of Work 2.0. I'm your co-host Idris Manley.

Ross Martin:

And I'm Ross Martin. Thanks for joining us. So Idris, for our topics today, we're still to the theme is still strategy management. But the first question is, what are some objective signs that your department organization team are under delivering some some objective signs? How would you even know That they're under delivering.

Idris Manley:

No. Yeah. That's a good one. That's a good one. Uh, well, the first question I would ask, are we, are we discussing the operational teams or teams, you know, operating or functioning in an operational capacity or in a project capacity? Teams can be do, be do both.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, well, I feel like let's, let's, let's, let's hit both of those. But, you know, what, which way would you like to go? First, you start thinking about a team start operation. Okay, let's talk about operationally. So their, their day to day work, and all the things they have to do to operate their portion of the business, and they're under delivering how, how would you even, you know, what were some signs would be some signs that you've seen in the past?

Idris Manley:

Well, I will say that it becomes easier to measure if the team's performing in a more mature way, right? So I think it's important to understand where the team is at on a scale of maturity. And if it is a low level of maturity, then that would imply that there are very few metrics and standards that have been placed to establish this baseline to be able to determine how well they are performing. If it's a higher performing team or if the team is operating, you know, more maturely, then that would imply that there are metrics and standards that have been well-defined and teams are being proactive in being able to evaluate where they are and hitting against those benchmarks. And they're having regular ongoing discussions with how they are performing. And so there's clear transparency and measurability and accountability in regards to those standards.

Ross Martin:

I would definitely agree on the operational side, the data is everything measurements, right? I mean, the reality is, is if you're looking at sales operations, or marketing operations, or, or perhaps like distribution operations, depending on what your company is, The reality is if the leaders of that area don't have constantly produced metrics about how they're doing, how they're delivering, turnaround times, all sorts of things, the sales funnels, how those things are performing, conversions of customers. If they don't know their data, then that's a pretty objective sign that they're underperforming.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think when it comes to operations, And part of the maturity is really understanding what level of documentation or how well you're defining what the operations are, what the processes are, right? And so for companies that are not necessarily as mature as you would desire, they may have very little documentation. So even though by definition, operations are repeatable processes that they're performing on a regular basis, they may have very little documentation around that. As a result, it may be more difficult to be able to even understand what the metrics should be or what the standard process actually is for producing a particular outcome or result.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Pivoting a little bit over towards, say, project-based work for teams. you know, thinking about what sort of things indicate that a team is underperforming. Again, I definitely would would fall back on on that they don't know where they are, and they don't have information at their fingertips, especially for the, maybe it's just a project manager, but if they don't know everything that's going on with their project, Or if it's a PMO leader, or if it's a business leader, and they're making a transformation project or someone in IT, if they're asked the question, how's project such and such going, and they don't know right off the top of their, you know, in a moment, generally where things are, I think that's a sign.

Idris Manley:

Yeah, I think projects is much more difficult to be able to evaluate performance because teams are working on other priorities. Uh, and there's no, and because it's a project, it implies that it's, you know, it's a one-time effort. And so you don't necessarily have benchmarks for that specific scope with those particular team members. Uh, and so there's so many variables that can come into play that could affect a team's performance. And so how do you evaluate if the impact is a result of individuals under performance, or they're actually working on other things that are also taking up their time, or the scope is just really challenging and some of the dependencies are just more difficult to resolve. And so I think when it comes to projects, you have to have a much more, as a project management perspective, oversight perspective, you have to have a lot more standardization and rigor and maturity in how you're managing it so that you can isolate when the issue is actually a team member in terms of performance or if it's the project itself.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, it actually reminds me, we had a situation at one of my companies where the scrum team for a particular product area was underperforming. But what the real reason was is that the VP of the engineering team kept pulling key people to solve production issues. And so their velocity was all over the place. They'd lose their best engineers or QA people at a moment's notice. So you'd think at first that there's something wrong with the team, but there was nothing wrong with the team. Yeah. It was just, it was just the boss.

Idris Manley:

Yeah. So it reminds me also, I, you know, I was head of PMO at a company and I was reporting to the COO and the COO had made a significant investment in resources and was under significant pressure to deliver a certain amount of product capability, you know, within a 12 month period. And there was a lot of pressure on the scrum teams to figure out how to increase their velocity. And so you have the product owners sort of blaming the engineering leads, the engineering leads are blaming the QA, and you have the scrum master in the middle of all of this trying to figure out where the issues are. It was, you know, it took some time to really get to the root cause and to understand where the issues were. And the reality was, it was a combination of all of it. You know, there was definitely across all of the functions that were delivering the product, they all played a role and it required better process definition, more clarity of role responsibility and standards, and ultimately holding people more clearly accountable for what they were responsible for in order to improve the delivering velocity.

Ross Martin:

Yeah, that that makes sense. Another example that just I thought of was, we had another situation where it was actually an executive that was underperforming. And that's hard to find sometimes. Yeah, but And in this case, they were relatively new, and of course, there's always a certain amount of latitude given as an executive gets into position and starts taking over the team and taking over the responsibilities and figuring out, in this case, this person didn't know the industry very well, they just knew their part of the business, or it was a consumer business. But what was interesting over time is what became clear and finally led to the senior executives of the company actually having this person depart was that their team around them was constantly confused and in chaos. So at first you think they're getting their feet wet and they're figuring out what's going on, but over time it becomes clear that all their direct reports and those people's direct reports are constantly confused. Yeah.

Idris Manley:

Yeah. Yeah. That reminds me, even the previous example that I gave you, I failed to mention that one of the obstacles was the executive as well in terms of their expectations. So, in this case, they weren't particularly familiar with Scrum and understood that part of the value of Scrum and the agility is really allowing teams to self-organize and to really learn and adapt quickly. And it requires that you're not necessarily going to have a clear commitment on when something is going to be due, but you have trust in the teams and their ability to self-organize in a way where they deliver as quickly as possible and to be able to achieve dates. when you have an executive that doesn't really, that's maybe more comfortable with waterfall and a more predictable sort of delivery methodology where you commit to a date and get the resources you need and you get it done, Agile can be very uncomfortable for executives that are accustomed to that. And in this case, I think the executive, that person had the wrong expectation on the team and didn't really give the team enough time to self-organize and to allow their performance to improve. And so it does require a certain amount of patience from executives as well to be part of the solution.

Ross Martin:

Yes, that's an interesting point. At one of the companies I was at, we had a thing called the year of four CEOs. And it's exactly what it sounds like. And what happened, interestingly enough, is it didn't really cause any major problems for ongoing operations. People did their job, sales were made, things going, all that kind of stuff. But any sort of major projects, were completely thrown on on that because they kept having these leadership changes. And so nobody knew whether their big project was going to be the next leader's, you know, favor, whether or not their budget would go away. And it paralyzed project teams for making progress because nobody knew what was going to happen next. It was too much top chaos. Yeah.

Idris Manley:

Yeah. Makes sense.