Aligning teams is not rocket science

In interviews, a Head of Engineering mentioned, “Understanding team dynamics is tough. Keeping things clear and getting people to follow processes is a challenge. Some team members seem disengaged.”

This issue might be part of a larger problem. Ensuring teams work toward the same goal is always tricky, especially with diverse teams where people have different priorities. Many managers face this too. After looking at feedback, we found some main reasons for this misalignment and are working to fix them. The potential issues could be one or more of these:

• Not enough process control.
• Unclear process standards.
• Different processes among teams.
• Lack of consequences due to limited transparency.
• Skill gaps.
• People feel ignored when their feedback isn’t valued.

Do any of these sound familiar? If so, learn how Qanban tackles these challenges to improve team alignment.

How Qanban addresses your challenges?

Qanban sees an organisation as a whole working system, understanding that altering or enhancing one aspect will affect the others. Therefore, Qanban endeavours to address all alignment issues simultaneously across various levels of the system to maintain consistency and optimise alignment between the organisational structure and the target operating model.

Scenario

To set the context and better understand the problem, we made a simple diagram that mirrors a real business situation. Depending on the company size, there could be even more teams involved, adding to the complexity. But for clarity in this article, we’ll keep it as simple as we can. 

In this setup, there’s an organisation with two departments, each with two teams overseen by a Head of Department who reports to the CEO. Each team has a Team Lead. The organisation is starting a new project that needs input from three teams, managed by a project manager. The project manager’s job is to make sure the project stays on schedule, help teams overcome any obstacles, report progress, and alert the Head of Department or CEO about any risks so they can be addressed promptly.

Alignment on program level

In Qanban, CEOs and managers can organise project initiatives into larger programs of work to align with program goals. At the program level, Qanban shows objectives, phase, priority, and the leader. On the project level, it provides insight into objectives, phase (like Analysis & Concept, Planning, Execution, Control, Closure), priority (like Urgent, High, Medium), and project lead, giving a clear view of initiative ownership.

Going deeper into projects, managers can see high-level progress at the epic level and who’s responsible for each epic, making it easy to check on progress. This approach helps to understand project ownership and track progress, focusing on major epic requirements that may take months to complete.

Alignment on project level

In Qanban, every project is defined by its purpose and leader, guaranteeing role clarity and enabling swift access to project details for handling urgent inquiries. When you enter a project in Qanban, you see all involved teams and their leaders, ensuring everyone has the right information about who does what. This helps managers communicate directives from senior leadership and explain organisational goals and the consequences of not following them.

To maintain transparency and alignment with the project scope, Qanban offers a project structure feature that showcases all necessary work items for project completion. Additionally, within each project, the “Project Deliverables” provides a summary of the required larger epics and features requirement to be delivered while the “Project Work Items” feature enables Product Owners or Business Analysts to create smaller user requirements and tasks before assigning them to respective teams for execution. This ensures that requirements are not overlooked, and project teams can clearly see and track them.

Qanban recognises that each project may require a customised process to accommodate its evolving requirements. It supports the breakdown of statuses into stages such as Analysis, Work Breakdown, Workshop, Development, and more, allowing for greater flexibility and more granular process management in the project.  

Alignment on team level

Understanding each team’s contributions to the project is simple with Qanban. By clicking on a team within the project, you can access their Kanban board, which shows their current tasks transparently. This feature allows you to monitor if they’re following the project plan and aligned with project objectives.

Qanban ensures that every team follows the project methodology, whether it’s Scrum or Kanban. Scrum involves planning and grouping work for a specific timeframe, typically every two weeks, suitable for product development. Kanban follows a free-flow approach, ideal for business support tasks.

Recognising that teams may need customised processes based on their maturity level, Qanban allows for stages like Analysis, Ready For Development, In Development, In QA, etc. This flexibility lets managers identify process differences across teams and ensure adherence to essential procedures. Managers can then choose to enforce a standard process or allow teams to create their own, as long as critical processes are followed.

While teams can independently create stories and tasks, Qanban mandates linking these items to specific project epics or features. This ensures that efforts are directed towards the correct goals, minimising wasted efforts and enabling managers to understand dependencies and necessary tasks for each epic and feature.

Alignment on stakeholder level

Occasionally, managers may need swift visibility into individual team members’ tasks, especially if they encounter recurring deadline issues. The User Workload feature, accessible within each team, provides an overview of individuals’ current tasks and upcoming assignments providing managers a comprehensive understanding of stakeholder capacity and productivity, promoting transparency and awareness.

What’s Next?

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