:AACE CERTIFICATION 2009-2010:

What is the key to failure of Transformer Team?

Getting stuck with what to write this week in blog, I decide to write what I think it’s a key to failure in AACE program for Transformer team and of course what’s the key to success. It’s just a personal point of view from what I’m experiencing with AACE program so far. My apologies if it hurts anyone: D

Let’s get start with the key to FAILURE first.
If we keep going on this way, we’ll failed in getting the team success
• Broken chain
We have decided that we set up a strong link with a big chain through the team connecting team members from different regions, different countries. However, so far no chain set up yet.
One of effort to make the team work or a chain is “peer review”. In a peer, each team member can cross check and exchange their work from one to another. Is that enough for a chain without any supervision if there’s any broken link? Does other peer know what’s going on with your peer? And how good is the quality of your works? God knows.

What is happening with all our projects is just getting the progress reported from each team member? Is there any link among team members on how the homework going on? What’s its quality? Or we just trust each other and hope to get good results at the end of this project. What we are ‘so-called” a team now doesn’t present its full functionality. What we’re performing now is just an individual effort but gather together in the same place.

It seems that we’re forgetting one of the key deliverables of this AACE project is how to get a team success not just an individual success. How can we get a high credit if the team deliverables are so poor like they are now?
ValeInco guys are doing good job but how to get these good guys contribute more to the team success? Where is the key link of the whole chain? How to save a weak link in a chain? All we need is a good project manager who can be a middle man to connect all stakeholders on the same line and get the project run on track.

• Poor Management efforts

Thanks to our dedicated Program Mangers/Project Managers who is devoted your time on the weekly reports, weekly analysis, and the encouraging emails. Nothing is called an action to get the team on board from our dear Management team so far.

A few emails from management team sent to ask for an action from anyone. If it’s in our real-life project, the project manager would not keep silent for days when we don’t complete our tasks as scheduled. So what’s missing here from Transformer’s managers? From my point of view it’s lack of forcing. Some of team members wouldn’t stay aside for such a long time if there was a strong message from managers with a clear instruction and deadline at the first stage. What’s the manager should do if his/her team members fail to meet the commitments many times? A very clear answer is in the project’s policy signed off my all team members!

Task delegation is not taken its advantage in our Transformers’ management style. If he/she is busy why shouldn’t he/she delegate tasks to other potential team member? That would be better than any excuses for late/missing/absence. In addition, delegating tasks is one of key skills to make the managers come closer to his/her team members as well as put motivation and challenges to the team members who are delegated.

• No quality check on the project works
Our project has finished 25% of its part but all is just through a paper report. No quality checks if each of task has been completed well. No one evaluates the quality of work done.
In real life, do you find any project that is supervised through a paper report on the progress weekly without any quality check? Luckily, it seems that our Client from Hell is just focusing on the progress he don’t care much about the quality of works done at present. Hmm, thanks to his kindness :D

-- To be continued --