Ghada Abdelmoumin

One of the most challenging aspects when organizations are going through a transition is managing change. People often feel comfortable exercising the norms or what it has become part of their every day routine. I think the best way to create support for the team during normal and heavy workload is to use an agile approach in which the idea of a self-managing team is greatly emphasized.

I propose that you break your team into smaller groups with careful attention to individuals and their intrinsic skills to create the needed group dynamic. A self-managing team with good dynamic shall have at least one team member that will eventually emerge as a natural leader. The groups must have a motto and the motto should be in line with the vision that mediated in the first place the organizational transition. The motto should be a message that resonate from week to week and transcend various levels within the organization.

To create a continuous form of support during this transition and ensure that fellow employees are supported, it would be of value to have a relaxed common meeting area where each group conducts one stand-up meeting at their own leisure during the third or fourth day of the week. This meeting should be “time-boxed”, fluid, and less informal. A preferred time-boxed meeting is a 15-20 minutes meeting. Each team can document on a common bulletin board that displays the motto answers to three questions: what they did in support of the transition, what are the impediments (if any), and what they are planning to do next. The whole team can then conduct another time-boxed, fluid, and informal stand-up meeting at the end of the week where all groups collectively share their experience.

Remark: some of the agile ideas expressed in this post is a courtesy of agilemethodology.org.