Project Cycle Optimisation™
Principle 2: Team Goal Alignment
Commercial and technical staff, contractors and outsourcing providers all need to be clear about your expectations for the project’s outcome. If not, disconnects will be created that affect the finished product. We can help determine, document and implement a very clear definition of all desired targets.
- A software project is ultimately a Company Project. In the end, more than one department will be impacted by the project, and all should be involved to ensure that their objectives are aligned.
- Software is needed to run the business, initiated by the business and engineered by the technical team. For external products it will even be promoted by the marketing department and sold by the sales team. Everybody is impacted by the decisions made. Everybody must be aiming at the same end result.
- Different departments, working in isolation, will follow their own agenda and constraints, creating tensions and conflict. The business needs to lead the way and align the goal of each team member in order to achieve success.
- All too often, the non-technical teams (e.g. business sponsors, product managers, users, stakeholders) are left aside or involved only when the project is completed. This way, valuable information, skills and feedback are lost when they could increase the overall value of the end product. The involvement of the non-technical teams must start from the beginning of the project and be maintained along its lifecycle.
- Assembling a team together in the sense of bringing the right people with the right skills together is easy compared to making this team “Goal aligned.” Software is a human adventure and human beings have individual agendas. Align these agendas and you'll accomplish miracles.
- The main effect of goal-alignment is to progress much faster than non-aligned projects. Individuals are aware of the shared objectives and look at these objectives as their own. Each step taken towards a shared objective is seen to profit both the group and the individual.
- Project initiation workshops are needed to Goal Align the team.
- Excellent communication channels will be needed to enforce, maintain and even increase Team Goal Alignment.
- Aligning the goals of the whole team will create commercially effective software.
- Goal Alignment will drastically reduce conflicts and therefore reduce time to market, improving Return On Investment.
