A well balanced team in an Enterprise 2.0 environment
Fundamentally, Enterprise 2.0 is about enabling teams to work better within the team and with other teams within the organisation. This led me to think about what is a well balanced team that can get things done effectively?
What does a good team comprise of?
Instead of reinventing the wheel, I hunted for some good resources. Kathleen Eisenhardt, Professor in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford spoke about the perfect team composition and below are some of her thinking.
A well balanced team are the following:
1) 3 to 5 people (if less than 3 then there will be too much work for everyone and its not really a team; if its more, then alot of time will be spent coordinating the work)
2) team members should be cross functional (two engineers do not make a good team)
3) team members should have a history of working together
4) Best teams have a variety of ages which reflects different life experiences thus providing a balanced view.
I think what Eisenhardt said is really good. Traditionally, the successful teams I have been part of displayed most, if not all, of the above traits.
Organising teams within an Enterprise 2.0 platform
This led me to think about organising team spaces within an enterprise 2.0 platform. I guess many early adopters of Enterprise 2.0 are faced with the issue of “How should we organise the spaces on the platform?” This is an important question as unused spaces could be viewed as failure by some new members of the community and if too much information within a space could be too overwhelming. We need a right balance.
I feel that a good way to manage is to replicate the real world team in the online environment. Within an organisation there are departments, service lines, teams and each should have a space of their own. Managers needs to start from the top of the organisation and start breaking them down into teams of 3-5 people and once this is achieve, get people to start contributing within the team and across teams.
This way, it provides individual teams with their own space and also a common space within department or higher level team where cross team communication can take place.
What do you think? Please feel free to add to it.
Mike said,
Good write up
I think the most important element in team work is synergy. It is important to actually find a team lead who can build synergies between team members, irrespective of who and where the team members are from.
I am quite surprise that team synergy building is not presented and is probably assumed in the proposal of such teams (since you didn’t mention it in your post) by the professor. If that assumption is correct, then I would like to think that it is somewhat inaccurate.
Sean Lew said,
Interesting you talk about synergies, Eisenhardt didn’t talk about team synergies in her lecture but you are right it is extremely important. But I would think that building synergies has something to do with human, feelings, management, environment and so on. I think it could be something that is hard to prescribe as a template. Its something good leaders do well and in fact sometime good leaders might not even do well because of environmental issues.
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