How to start to understand each other
A quick guide to building communication and project vision in a team
Many companies face difficulties with internal communications, as well as a lack of understanding of the processes that take place among team members. This affects not only the company and the client, but also the product itself.
Companies that pay attention to the employee experience have twice as many loyal customers and a 25% increase in profits.
Building the perfect employee experience is the responsibility of Service Design, a systematic process where the key elements are:
- building communication between employees and departments of the company;
- creating a unified project management process.
Solving these tasks allows us to optimise processes, reduce costs, increase time for development and creativity, and allocate resources for training and experience exchange.
I support this principle: a product is just a link in the chain, an important link. But in addition to it, there is the scope of use of this product, the experience of interacting with it, as well as the processes, infrastructure, and most importantly, the people who are affected by this product. Therefore, it is worth starting development with a context study.
A systematic approach and the involvement of energetic professionals in the IT industry have created excellent tools that can be applied to SD. In essence, building communications and project management is a product, and in any product, User eXperience plays a key role.
Don Norman said about UX: "User experience covers all aspects of the end user's interaction with the company, its services and products."
Interview representatives from each department. The more employees you interview, the better the result. Be sure to find out:
- What actions does the employee take on projects?
- What do they expect to get as a result?
- How do they interact with projects and colleagues: email, messenger, personal communication, etc.
During the survey, you will learn about the difficulties they face, understand what they find convenient, and what they expect from colleagues.
Step 1. Surveys and interviews
In my case, everyone was united by the fact that the guys saw difficulties in the current system of interaction between the company's divisions.
Based on the data collected, create a generalised portrait of a representative of any department. You will have a set of people (manager, designer, supervisor, etc.), each of whom has their own goals and performs the tasks assigned to their role.
The next step in the preparation will be the creation of
Customer Journey Map and application of the concept
Jobs to be Done:
- CJM. Build an interaction map for all created users. At each stage of the project, write down goals, channels, interactions, experiences, emotions, and importance. There should be ideas for improvement, but it's best to slow down at this point.
- JTBD. The most important step will be to understand the true expectations of employees: what the user really needs to get at a particular stage of the project. The results of the survey will come in handy here, and additional rounds of interviews can be conducted to complete the overall picture. It is very important not to cross the line and to define your goals for a specific stage of the project.
- CJM. Go back to the map and with a new perspective on what is happening, try to add ideas for improvement.
This approach will give a deeper understanding of each of the participants. It will not only identify bottlenecks in communications, but also reveal unmet expectations, which will allow you to formulate the right questions and think about optimising the entire system for each of the characters. As you move through the project, consistently comparing each user and their needs with the other participants, you can find solutions to many problem areas.
For example, in a manager-designer pair: the manager didn't want to write briefs, he copied letters from clients, but didn't prepare the task. And the designer wanted to reduce the time spent on studying the brief, which is why he missed important details in the task description. The analysis led to the decision to create an electronic non-linear form for filling out, consisting of several simple steps. The manager will choose the options offered, and the designer will see the same structure that he is used to and can quickly read information from.
Key 1 - The team
Assemble a minimum team consisting of representatives from each department. At the analysis stage, look at how your colleagues communicate with you and invite them to participate in the creation of new communication.
I put together a working group, which I asked to include colleagues who wanted to change the situation and employees who had been involved in conflicts. The main thing is that the former outnumber the latter. When discussing problematic situations, we were able to take a comprehensive approach to solving complex issues, move forward and always have feedback. I also understood that if the "hot heads" accepted the innovations, it would be much easier to convince the rest.
Key 2 - Roadmap
One of the main achievements will be the creation of a roadmap showing the project's path through the company. Just as in a call centre, the operator always knows what to answer, so any employee will look at the map and understand where they are at and choose the path to follow.
The map outline is already sewn into CJM. Ask your team to take a look at it, and it will add a lot of useful information. You'll be surprised how many discoveries colleagues from different departments will make about each other's work, and be sure to work together on ideas for improvement.
In my case, I managed to combine the conceptual apparatus of everyone in the company. Regardless of whether they have worked for a month or several years, people began to know where they are and where they can move on.
Key 3 - Checklists
How often do you have to re-read the brief when you receive a task? And during the work, do you find out that one thing doesn't fit with the other and important data is simply missing?
Create a checklist - a list of requirements for transferring information from one project stage to another. It is formed by the performer of a particular stage. If you've assembled the right team, it already has all the right heroes who will create everything themselves. All you have to do is moderate their interaction.
My company's managers got rid of the stress and time spent on data collection, and the executives magically started to have what they had specified when they created the system.
Key 4 - Project structure and naming system
Sound familiar? What's inside the file? And in a large project with many files? At the same time, employees tend to take time off, ask for time off, and, unfortunately, get sick, which is not good for a business that is not ready to wait. It takes precious time to sort out the mess, and it takes just as much time to sort out someone else's project, so you need a concise, uniform structure for naming and managing projects of different types. And it doesn't matter if they are local files or cloud-based with multi-user mode.
The rules we created a few years ago allowed us to pick up each other's projects on the fly and significantly reduced the number of errors. There is no limit to perfection, and we have accumulated a lot of feedback over time, which we have taken into account in the updated structure.
Key 5 - Project system
Your colleagues will be happy if you reduce the amount of routine associated with project management, create a log of all actions, and have a library with source codes, sketches, drawings, etc. Add to this access to data outside the office, and even via mobile phone, and you will become a hero. But for this, you need an automated management system. You can choose one of the existing ones on the market that suits your project structure or create your own - it's not fast and not cheap, but the result is worth it with the right approach.
We've tried a number of third-party project management systems, most of which turned out to be tailored more for development teams, with the potential for long-term development of several products with an average number of tasks. At the same time, the agency develops a lot of products that are grouped into projects based on a number of features, and these projects are numerous and fleeting.
Keys 6, 7 and 8 - Hiring, onboarding and trainingTogether with HR, review your approach to hiring and onboarding new employees, as there are likely to be many areas for improvement. If you have a new employee, engage them in a discussion, ask them questions about how they see the company, what they understand and know about the process, and where they have difficulties. Discuss with the business opportunities for training key players and sharing experiences within the team. This will allow you to:
- Strengthen the team and identify leaders who will join the development process.
- To "dive deeper into customers" or understand customer needs.
- Increase the speed of work and reduce the number of errors.
The implementation of these keys was the first thing we managed to put into practice. We have radically changed our approach to hiring new employees, created an onboarding programme, prepared a growth plan for the team and introduced experience-sharing seminars.
The Buddha said: "There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way."
It's been two years since the start of the innovations, and so many new opportunities for improvement have opened up over this time that we have to restrain ourselves and focus on the main thing. The key tasks are still in the process of being solved, but there are already inspiring results:
- The volume of projects has increased by 30% over the past 2 years, and we have done it without increasing the team. It seemed impossible, but the changes we made made it possible to optimise processes, reduce the number of errors, and virtually eliminate rework.
- We now have time for seminars and experience exchange. The "creative minds" began to devote most of their time to developing the products offered by the agency, which resulted in a third increase in the quality and number of options offered.
- These results had an impact on business goals: costs were reduced by almost a quarter, and profits increased by 33%.
The pandemic situation in the world has slowed down the implementation of solutions somewhat, but it has also provided an opportunity to rethink a number of steps and test the strength of the solutions. The changes made it easy to transfer the team's work to a remote mode.
It is important not just to produce a quality product, but to do so with an understanding of how the product will interact with the world and people. The team plays a key role in the creation of any product, and a lot depends on how the relationships within the team are built and the communication process is established.