Team Unity
Vision and communication need to go hand in hand, so bringing consultants together early to understand the objectives of what they are working on and what their roles are within the project is key.
It’s important to try and create a social event to get people interacting and engaging outside of work to show that these are your colleagues rather than rivals. Once people understand you're all in it together and you get to know them on a personal level, that really helps to build bonds.
You can also encourage cohesion by empowering existing employees to act as mentors or single points of contact for the new team.
If consultants are remote, circumvent this by arranging more frequent online meetings. It’s the little things that make the difference here – one of them being to ensure everybody has their camera on all the time. There can be a tendency, especially amongst developers, to try and dial in without the camera on, but having them on means there’s more participation, and it’s more likely that everyone will be heard.
Managing change
Change can fail when you try and go too big too soon, so smaller, gradual, but continuous change is always preferable.
The introduction of change follows a curve where people fall into different brackets. You’ve got your innovators, early adopters, the majority, the late adopters, then the laggers.
Ask yourself: can you sell the vision to all of those people?
Can you take all of those different types of people on this journey with you? And do you have stages for each of these people to get involved and to jump on board?
If the answer is ‘no’, edit your plans and communications until you have.
Think about creating space for change.
Use your own ‘test pilots’ to test the change velocity and learn what issues you will take on board before you scale. Scale slowly, learn, remediate and move forward.
Inspiring vision is imperative, and leadership must be fully involved in any change.
UBS is a great example. We're working with them very closely on an agile transformation and they are fully immersed in it from the very, very top, right down from the CEO who is constantly talking about agile, through the entire workforce. And if the CEO wasn't engaged, it wouldn't work.