ALCS IT Team ways of working

For the last year or so I have been working with this IT Team to review and standardise ways of working and processes, particularly around surfacing the business priorities in a workable roadmap for the entire team to be able to understanding, engage with and update, rather than the work of the team being slightly divorced from the overall objectives of the organisation.

Its a team of 8 but the team is intrinsically linked with the rest of the business, and the work that ALCS do is complex so its been a super fun and interesting project to work on, and another where the clients themselves have reall gone in with 2 feet on the approaches I’ve been bringing.

So what have I done with them? The scope of the work was less about decision-making, power and lessening hierarchy, and more abot oiling the wheels for a great team to get even better at what they do, along with supporting Rob, the Team Lead to become less involved in everything the team does and more able to take the space he needs to lead more strategically.

Created a high(ish)level roadmap of all the IT Team objectives and developing a habit of reviewing this collectively as a team once a month in place of a round of ‘updates’ (yawn). This has created much more connection with the team’s everyday work andhow it relates to what the business actually needs and wants, and has enabled more focus on areas of work that the IT team wants to do.

• Developed process maps of the key IT related workflows and reviewed if these are working, making small improvements.
• Supporting the agile project team developing some key internal tooling with agile rocess, their relationships with the supplier
• Started to introduce some approaches and thinking around effective feedback across the organisation
• Designed an approach to running team sprints that will hopefully be spread across the business and enable more innovation and development of staff ideas
• Running regular (every 6 months) team planning and review sessions to keep the transparency of the business objectives at the front of the team’s minds

This work looking very practically at ways of working for a team took me right back to my roots of tech project management. It was great to mix the practice I’ve developed throgh working on leadership culture, decision-making, power dynamics, along with the more pragmatic side of work processes.