How to staff your next transformation team

Place your people in roles that count

Identify key roles within your project that demand deep business context and institutional knowledge and assign them to your most capable staff. And it’s not just leadership positions.

Naming your top team member as a Product Owner for a critical project is a great start. Their experience and institutional knowledge is invaluable for guiding the project team and prioritising tasks to ensure the development of the right products and features. This pivotal role can determine the success or failure of a project and should never be outsourced to external suppliers or contractors.

Equally, pairing one of your team members with an external business analyst or discovery team to uncover issues and gather business requirements is also wise. They will provide essential business context and identify potential problems early on.

Create balance with blended teams

Integrating your internal teams with external consultants and suppliers is a highly effective strategy. External consultants bring high-value skills and experience, and your team provide invaluable inside knowledge about your organisation. The blended team breaks entrenched thinking and encourages new ways of working, creating an essential balance between knowledge, experience, and innovation.

This approach also facilitates knowledge transfer, as your internal team members shadow skilled professionals, acquiring expertise that remain long after the project concludes. This form of experiential learning is incredibly powerful, significantly enhancing staff retention and boosting team motivation.

Build persistent teams

Teams which stay together over multiple projects have a shorter learning curve and deliver productivity and outcomes faster. Their established forms of communication and ways of working deliver enhanced continuity and cohesion.

The trust inherent in these teams leads to increased levels of experimentation and innovation which is critical in digital transformation projects. Team members spend less time getting to know one another and more time focussed on the business problem.

This level of quality, collaboration, and increased outputs can’t be achieved with a transient workforce of individual contractors. Individual resource augmentation should be used cautiously.

Conclusion

Organisations who are serious about achieving outcomes need to invest in persistent teams, blended resources capabilities, and avoid large-scale resource augmentation.