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Improve IT Team Effectiveness

Implement the four critical factors required for all high-performing teams.

  • Organizations rely on team-based work arrangements to provide organizational benefits and to help them better navigate the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) operating environment.
  • This is becoming more challenging in a hybrid model as interactions now rely less on casual encounters and now must become more intentional.
  • A high-performing team is more than productive. They are more resilient and able to recognize opportunities. They are proactive instead of reactive due to trust and a high level of communication and collaboration.
  • IT teams are more unique, which also provides unique challenges other teams don’t experience.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

IT teams have:

  • Multiple disciplines that tend to operate in parallel versus within a sequence of events.
  • Multiple incumbent roles where people operate in parallel versus needing to share information to produce an outcome.
  • Multiple stakeholders who create a tension with competing priorities.

Impact and Result

Use Info-Tech’s phased approach to diagnose your team and use the IDEA model to drive team effectiveness.

The IDEA model includes four factors to identify team challenges and focus on areas for improvement: identity, decision making, exchanges within the team, and atmosphere of team psychological safety.


Improve IT Team Effectiveness Research & Tools

1. Team Effectiveness Storyboard – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to properly assess your team’s effectiveness and activities that will identify solutions to overcome.

The storyboard will walk you through three critical steps to assess, analyze, and build solutions to improve your team’s effectiveness.

The blueprint includes instructions for:

  • Having your team members complete an assessment.
  • Reviewing and sharing the results.
  • Building a list of activities to select from based on the assessment results to ensure you target the problem you are facing.

2. The Team Effectiveness Survey – A tool that will determine what areas you are doing well in and where you can improve team relations and increase productivity.

Each stage has a deliverable that will support your journey on increasing effectiveness starting with how to communicate to the assessment which will accumulate into a team charter and action plan.

3. Facilitation Guide – A collection of activities to select from and use with your team.

The Facilitation Guide contains instructions to facilitating several activities aligned to each area of the IDEA Model to target your approach directly to your team’s results.

Included in the activities are:

  • Determining roles and responsibilities on the team.
  • Creating a decision-making model that outlines levels of authority and who makes the decisions.
  • Assessing the team communications flow, which highlights the communication flow on the team and any bottlenecks.
  • Building a communication poster that articulates methods used to share different information within the team.

Completing a psychological safety worksheet to identify what actions can be taken to create a safe atmosphere on the team.

4. Action Plan – A template to help build your team action plan.

The Action Plan Template captures next steps for the team on what they are committing to in order to build a more effective team.

5. Team Charter – A template to create a charter for a work group or project team.

A Team Charter captures the agreements your team makes with each other in terms of accepted behaviors and how they will communicate, make decisions, and create an environment that everyone feels safe contributing in.


Member Testimonials

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.

9.5/10


Overall Impact

$12,599


Average $ Saved

5


Average Days Saved

Client

Experience

Impact

$ Saved

Days Saved

Edmonton Regional Airports Authority

Guided Implementation

10/10

N/A

N/A

We have engaged with Jane Kouptsova to have her conduct the Team Effectiveness workshop for our technology business branch at EIA. After collecting... Read More

Zimmer Biomet

Guided Implementation

9/10

$12,599

5

Great trainings and Great material. Looking forward to the opportunity to work together again in the future.

First Ontario Credit Union Ltd.

Guided Implementation

9/10

$20,500

5

I think we had some great conversation and reviewed some very relevant tools to enhance my team leadership. I look forward to diving deeper into th... Read More

Zodiac Pool Systems LLC

Guided Implementation

8/10

N/A

2


Workshop: Improve IT Team Effectiveness

Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Module 1: Assess the Team

The Purpose

Determine if proceeding is valuable.

Key Benefits Achieved

Set context for team members.

Activities

Outputs

1.1

Review the business context.

1.2

Identify IT team members to be included.

1.3

Determine goals and objectives.

1.4

Build execution plan and determine messaging.

  • Execution and communication plan
1.5

Complete IDEA Model assessment.

  • IDEA Model assessment distributed

Module 2: Review Results and Action Plan

The Purpose

Review results to identify areas of strength and opportunity.

Key Benefits Achieved


As a team, discuss results and determine actions.

Activities

Outputs

2.1

Debrief results with leadership team.

2.2

Share results with team.

  • IDEA assessment results
2.3

Identify areas of focus.

2.4

Identify IDEA Model activities to support objectives and explore areas of focus.

  • Selection of specific activities to be facilitated

Module 3: Document and Measure

The Purpose

Review results to identify areas of strength and opportunity.

Key Benefits Achieved

build an action plan of solutions to incorporate into team norms.

Activities

Outputs

3.1

Create team charter.

  • Team Charter
3.2

Determine action plan for improvement.

  • Action Plan
3.3

Determine metrics.

3.4

Determine frequency of check-ins.


Improve IT Team Effectiveness

Implement the four critical factors required for all high-performing teams.

Analyst Perspective

All teams need to operate effectively; however, IT teams experience unique challenges.

IT often struggles to move from an effective to a high-performing team due to the very nature of their work. They work across multiple disciplines and with multiple stakeholders.

When operating across many disciplines it can become more difficult to identify the connections or points of interactions that define effective teams and separate them from being a working group or focus on their individual performance.

IT employees also work in close partnership with multiple teams outside their IT domain, which can create confusion as to what team are they a primary member of. The tendency is to advocate for or on behalf of the team they primarily work with instead of bringing the IT mindset and alignment to IT roadmap and goals to serve their stakeholders.

A Picture of Amanda Mathieson

Amanda Mathieson
Research Director, People & Leadership Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

The Challenge

Organizations rely on team-based work arrangements to provide organizational benefits and better navigate the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) operating environment.

This is becoming more challenging in a hybrid environment as interactions now rely less on casual encounters and must become more intentional.

A high-performing team is more than productive. They are more resilient and able to recognize opportunities. They are proactive instead of reactive due to the trust and high level of communication and collaboration.

Common Obstacles

IT teams are more unique, which also provides unique challenges other teams don't experience:

  • Multiple disciplines that tend to operate in parallel versus within a sequence of events
  • Multiple incumbent roles where people operate in parallel versus needing to share information to produce an outcome
  • Multiple stakeholders that create a tension with competing priorities

Info-Tech's Approach

Use Info-Tech's phased approach to diagnose your team and use the IDEA model to drive team effectiveness.

The IDEA model includes four factors to identify team challenges and focus on areas for improvement: identity, decision making, exchanges within the team, and atmosphere of team psychological safety.

Info-Tech Insight

IT teams often fail to reach their full potential because teamwork presents unique challenges and complexities due to the work they do across the organization and within their own group. Silos, not working together, and not sharing knowledge are all statements that indicate a problem. As a leader it's difficult to determine what to do first to navigate the different desires and personalities on a team.

How this blueprint will help

Assess, diagnose, and address issues to realize your team's full potential.

This research helps IT support:

  • Work Teams: Operate under one organizational unit or function. Their membership is generally stable with well-defined roles.
  • Project Teams: Typically, are time-limited teams formed to produce a particular output or project. Their membership and expertise tend to vary over time.
  • Management or Leadership Teams: Provide direction and guidance to the organization and are accountable for overall performance. Membership is structured by the hierarchy of the organization and includes a diverse set of skills, experience, and expertise.

Traditionally, organizations have tried to fix ineffective teams by focusing on these four issues: composition, leadership competencies, individual-level performance, and organizational barriers. While these factors are important, our research has shown it is beneficial to focus on the four factors of effective teams addressed in this blueprint first. Then, if additional improvement is needed, shift your focus to the traditional issue areas.

Common obstacles

These barriers make it difficult to address effectiveness for many IT teams:

  • Teams do not use one standard set of processes because they may have a wide variety of assignments requiring different sets of processes.
    Source: Freshworks
  • There are multiple disciplines within IT that require vastly different skill sets. Finding the connection points can be difficult when on the surface it seems like success doesn't require interconnectivity.
  • IT has many people in the same roles that act independently based on the stakeholder or internal customer they are serving. This can lead to duplication of effort if information and solutions aren't shared.
  • IT serves many parts of the organization that can bring competing priorities both across the groups they support and with the IT strategy and roadmap itself. Many IT leaders work directly in or for the business, which can see them associate with the internal client team more than their IT team – another layer of conflicting priorities.

IT also experience challenges with maturity and data silos

48%

of IT respondents rate their team as low maturity.

Maturity is defined by the value they provide the business, ranging from firefighting to innovative partner.

Source: Info-Tech Research Group, Tech Trends, 2022

20 Hours

Data Silos: Teams waste more than 20 hours per month due to poor collaboration and communication.

Source: Bloomfire, 2022

Current realities require teams to operate effectively

How High-Performing Teams Respond:

Volatile: High degree of change happening at a rapid pace, making it difficult for organizations to respond effectively.

Teams are more adaptable to change because they know how to take advantage of each others' diverse skills and experience.

Uncertain: All possible outcomes are not known, and we cannot accurately assess the probability of outcomes that are known.

Teams are better able to navigate uncertainty because they know how to work through complex challenges and feel trusted and empowered to change approach when needed.

Complex: There are numerous risk factors, making it difficult to get a clear sense of what to do in any given situation.

Teams can reduce complexity by working together to identify and plan to appropriately mitigate risk factors.

Ambiguous: There is a lack of clarity with respect to the causes and consequences of events.

Teams can reduce ambiguity through diverse situational knowledge, improving their ability to identify cause and effect.

Teams struggle to realize their full potential

Poor Communication

To excel, teams must recognize and adapt to the unique communication styles and preferences of their members.

To find the "just right" amount of communication for your team, communication and collaboration expectations should be set upfront.

85% of tech workers don't feel comfortable speaking in meetings.
Source: Hypercontext, 2022

Decision Making

Decision making is a key component of team effectiveness. Teams are often responsible for decisions without having proper authority.

Establishing a team decision-making process becomes more complicated when appropriate decision-making processes vary according to the level of interdependency between team members and organizational culture.

20% of respondents say their organization excels at decision making.
Source: McKinsey, 2019

Resolving Conflicts

It is common for teams to avoid/ignore conflict – often out of fear. People fail to see how conflict can be healthy for teams if managed properly.

Leaders assume mature adults will resolve conflicts on their own. This is not always the case as people involved in conflicts can lack an objective perspective due to charged emotions.

56% of respondents prioritize restoring harmony in conflict and will push own needs aside.
Source: Niagara Institute, 2022

Teams with a shared purpose are more engaged and have higher performance

Increased Engagement

3.5x

Having a shared team goal drives higher engagement. When individuals feel like part of a team working toward a shared goal, they are 3.5x more likely to be engaged.

Source: McLean & Company, Employee Engagement Survey, IT respondents, 2023; N=5,427

90%

Engaged employees are stronger performers with 90% reporting they regularly accomplish more than what is expected.

Source: McLean & Company, Employee Engagement Survey, IT respondents, 2023; N=4,363

Effective and high-performing teams exchange information freely. They are clear on the purpose and goals of the organization, which enable empowerment.

Info-Tech Insight

Clear decision-making processes allow employees to focus on getting the work done versus navigating the system.

Case Study

Project Aristotle at Google – What makes a team effective at Google?

INDUSTRY: Technology
SOURCE: reWork

Challenge

Google wanted to clearly define what makes a team effective to drive a consistent meaning among its employees. The challenge was to determine more than quantitative measures, because more is not always better as it can just mean more mistakes to fix, and include the qualitative factors that bring some groups of people together better than others.

Solution

There was no pattern in the data it studied so Google stepped back and defined what a team is before embarking on defining effectiveness. There is a clear difference between a work group (a collection of people with little interdependence) and a team that is highly interdependent and relies on each other to share problems and learn from one another. Defining the different meanings took time and Google found that different levels of the organization were defining effectiveness differently.

Results

Google ended up with clear definitions that were co-created by all employees, which helped drive the meaning behind the behaviors. More importantly it was also able to define factors that had no bearing on effectiveness; one of which is very relevant in today's hybrid world – colocation.

It was discovered that teams need to trust, have clarity around goals, have structure, and know the impact their work has.

Overcoming barriers

Teams often lack the skills or knowledge to increase effectiveness and performance.

  • Leaders struggle with team strife and ineffectiveness.
  • A leader's ability to connect with and engage team members is vital for driving desired outcomes. However, many team leads struggle to deal with low-performing or conflict-ridden teams.
  • Without adequate training on providing feedback, coaching, and managing difficult conversations, team leads often do not have the skills to positively affect team performance – and they do not appreciate the impact their actions have on desired outcomes.
  • Team leads often find it difficult to invest time and resources in addressing challenges when the team is working toward deadlines.
  • Team leads who are new to a management role within the organization often struggle to transition from independent contributor to leader – especially when they are tasked with managing team members who are former peers.
  • Some team leads believe that soliciting help will be viewed as a personal failure, so they are reluctant to seek support for team performance management from more-senior leaders.

It's unrealistic to expect struggling teams to improve without outside help; if they were able to, they would have already done so.
To improve, teams require:

  • A clearly defined team identity
  • A clearly defined decision-making paradigm
  • Consistently productive exchanges within the team
  • An atmosphere of psychological safety

BUT these are the very things they are lacking when they're struggling.

Implement the four critical factors required for all high-performing teams.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

MEMBER RATING

9.5/10
Overall Impact

$12,599
Average $ Saved

5
Average Days Saved

After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.

Read what our members are saying

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 7 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Assess the team
  • Call 1: Scope requirements, objectives, and your specific challenges.
  • Call 2: Prepare to assess your team(s) using the assessment tool.

Guided Implementation 2: Review results and action plan
  • Call 1: Review the assessment results and plan next steps.
  • Call 2: Review results with team and determine focus using IDEA model to identify activity based on results.
  • Call 3: Complete activity to determine solutions to build your action plan.

Guided Implementation 3: Document and measure
  • Call 1: Build out your team agreement.
  • Call 2: Identify measures and frequency of check-ins to monitor progress.

Author

Amanda Mathieson

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