digital PM world
Why does teamwork matter at work?
Teamwork is super crucial at work. It does not only make a project more fun but it is also the quintessence of work. It is basically just like performing as part of a sports team! It’s all about the strengths of every individual person, but only when combining each other’s strengths and unique capabilities you can collectively achieve good results.
One Thing to Do Now: Start a Digital Community of Practice
In an emergency, you might not have time to stop and work out your whole governing framework-which includes identifying your team. So if there’s one piece of advice I would give you, it would be to establish a digital community of practice (CoP). It’s a shortcut to holistic digital team communications. In my consulting practice, having a digital CoP (DCoP) has been the most powerful practice when helping teams get logistically, mentally, and emotionally on the same page.
Leadership
In organizations that have a formal digital governance framework, digital CoPs are led and administered by someone on the core team-usually whoever is the steward of standards or policies. (The steward is the person who makes sure you have a solid set of policies and standards and that they are kept up to date.) If you don’t have a policy or standards steward, pick who you think is in charge of digital. If there’s a debate about this, say between marketing and IT, then have them co-chair. Push aside your differences for the greater good.
Design as a team sport
The old stereotype of the “rockstar designer” is (thankfully) going away. As digital teams grow and projects become more complex, designers are being valued by collaboration and team enablement rather than only individual tasks.
Designers as enablers
If your team is constantly asking for clarity about a project, or your workflow feels like you’re pushing tasks through a production line, these are signs you need to step up and act as a facilitator, reframing the design process in different ways.
- Pushing for more user research could be framed as growing curiosity across the team to learn more about the users and the product space.
- Polishing an interaction or animation could be done in collaboration with developers and be framed as a desire to deliver high-quality experiences.
- Feedback could go beyond “leaving comments on the doc”, and happen in both structured and unstructured ways.
Design is a horizontal discipline. Our natural ability as designers to empathize with others and understand their motivations can work in our favor within our companies as well.
Collaboration — it’s a process, not tools!
Collaboration space for creative solutions. A network model for teamwork and without company hierarchy, just new leadership style for digital teams.
