This Focused Performance Weblog is a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective. TOC is noted for its applications in Project Management and Multi-Project Management (Critical Chain) and Operations Management (Drum-Buffer-Rope), as well as in Marketing, Strategic Planning and Change Management (TOC Thinking Processes). If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Saturday, February 07, 2004
Team-Building Boondoggles - A recent prospective client, who really needs help in getting their project performance act together, had to renege on a planned introductory workshop (aka sales pitch with value) because the budget (for time and money) had been hijacked to support a top-down initiative in "team-building." You know...one of those totally meaningless boondoggles in which people are put in artificial environments that have no real relationship to their actual performance issues.
Allow me to suggest a difference (somewhat circular) cause-and-effect relationship between project success and "teamwork." Rather than rely on silly team-building exercises to try to support project success, I would far more prefer to rely on effective project management to build a groups sense of accomplishment and can-do-ism. After all, the project is only a temporary endeavor. It's likely that the team will need to work together again. If it's disheartened and discouraged by lack of performance, that depression and dysfunction will taint future efforts as well. Sort of the the equivalent of the negation of a pile of "attaboys" by one "aw, s4!t."
There are common root causes beneath both poor teamwork and poor project performance. Lack of team cohesion arises when people's common sense is violated -- when they are forced to behave based primarily on CYA concerns. These violations, conflicts, and dilemmas arise when necessary conditions for an efforts success are out of alignment.
Get rid of the project conflicts between reliability and speed, between one project and another, between resource management and project management, and between local and global optima, (all very doable, once erroneous assumptions are identified and dealt with) and you're well on the way to effective projects, which will lead to a sense of teamness, which will feed back into more effective projects, which will lead to......
Deal with the conflicts at the root, then spend group get-togethers in celebration instead of in outward bound "team-building" boondoggles.
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