Build Organizational Force Multipliers to Scale Your Software Delivery Business
Growth makes scaling quality difficult. "Accelerator Teams" build and release the foundational staff and skills your organization needs to maintain quality at scale.
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As companies encounter increased scale, they often need help to maintain their prior level of quality and standards. There are several contributing factors, including, but not limited to:
Teams are split up and reformed to spread experience across multiple teams
Norms shift based on new or departing team member influence
Success criteria drift from the original corporate intent
“Business as usual” tendencies that promote death march-style delivery
Reducing the impact of these challenges will result in better scale and more success—for the company and its employees.
Accelerator Teams Drive Sustained Growth
Accelerator Teams are our innovative solution to this challenge. These are small teams that build strong outcomes while emitting equally strong resources. They are designed to help maintain and increase quality at scale.
Mentors, the backbone of Accelerator Teams, play a pivotal role. Like traditional player/coach roles, these individuals take on management and delivery responsibilities. Their role is crucial, as they ensure successful project execution and foster the development of autonomous resources that can be integrated into other teams, providing a solid support system.
Mentors can be easily confused with traditional project managers. Project managers tend to oversee projects in a relatively hands-off fashion compared to mentors. Mentors roll up their sleeves, work side-by-side, and lead by example in all project areas. On smaller projects, they will fill more general roles; conversely, they will likely have more focused roles on larger projects.
Mentors are the only static members of Accelerator Teams. Once project execution is done, or when a team member is ready and the broader team has a need, all non-mentor team members will be injected into projects. Each resource takes the mindset, best practices, and professional understanding to lead directly and by example.
Below are outlined the principles mentors instill into “Accelerants” (a.k.a. Accelerator Team graduates).
Autonomous Resources
A critical difference between an Accelerator Team and a “Business as Usual” (BAU) Team is that an Accelerator Team focuses on breeding autonomous resources. A typical BAU Team tends to implement the infamous “80/20” principle, highlighting how 80 percent of a team's work is accomplished by 20 percent of the team’s resources1. This often results in “death marches,” where the most productive members of the teams work night and day to ensure the project succeeds.
When these BAU Teams are successful, well-intentioned management often splits the team to inject the team’s success into subsequent teams2. The result is predictable. Teams that receive resources carrying the load on the preceding team generally get a lift. In contrast, the other teams are saddled with new members accustomed to looking to others to carry the load.
Accelerator Teams resolve these problems by focusing on what we refer to as the 100/100 principle, in which all team members carry their weight. Based on typical BAU Team experience, this sounds unreasonable, but the 100/100 principle is achievable with appropriate guidance. The following expectations are immediately set up for all Accelerator Team members:
Mistakes Happen: make sure they happen with 100% effort and learn from them
Drive Results: you are responsible for your success; results stand the test of time
Intent > Rules: understand the intent of team norms and let them be your guide - blind devotion to rules is not tolerated
With these simple rules well understood, team members can achieve outsized results regardless of their experience level. Further, these team members become accelerants to their next project—akin to the 20% from a BAU team.
We often hear skepticism about the existence of a 100/100 principle team. Wouldn’t there be “bad hires” or underperformers? Yes, these scenarios do occur and happen regularly. That said, they happen less frequently with Accelerator Teams because mentors are uniquely positioned to understand the daily skills that make a team member successful. After all, they are executing those roles themselves. Additionally, Accelerator Teams are trained to know that there are rarely “bad people,” but there are often poor team fits. When this situation occurs, your duty as a valuable team member is to help find that person a better fit on a different team.
Impact-Focused Team Norms
Accelerator Teams lean heavily on team norms that directly contribute to project impact and quality. Strong team norms allow Accelerator Teams to build specializing generalists rather than specialists with narrow expertise3. When you know what to expect from your teammates in various situations, from project priorities to requirements analysis and deployment details, everyone can move with incredible velocity without compromising quality. Generalization also allows teams to be inherently more fungible and move faster.
Consider a traditional BAU Team for a software delivery effort:
0.25 Project Manager
.5 “Scrum Master”
.75 Requirements Analyst
1 UI Developer
1 Service Developer
.5 DevOps Engineer
Staffing this project is challenging. Not only do we need to find multiple fractional resources, but we also need to share them with other projects. This translates to wait time when effort is required, context switching between projects, and implicit reinforcement of the “that’s not my job” mentality. It also creates a massive tax on team norms, as these bonds are challenging to build when working with team members on a fractional basis.
Contrast that with the same level of staffing on an Accelerator Team:
1 Mentor
3 Specializing/Generalists
With a flat structure and the ability to have multiple resources that can service any need on the team, wait time is primarily eliminated, context switching is limited to task type rather than the entire project, and everything is your job. This last point is critical. Accelerator Teams focus on the next-highest-value need and understanding cross-discipline norms, not the next task in their specific “job jar.”
A common concern with this approach is that you can’t build entire organizations with specializing generalists - there just aren’t enough. Depending on your organization’s size, this can certainly be true. Accelerator Teams are not intended to make up your entire organization. Think of them as similar to how the US Military Academies work. These institutions are tasked with building and delivering Officers. They are not the only source of Officers, and ultimately, their graduates are injected into units that are almost entirely composed of personnel from other sources. However, these Academy-sourced Officers are crucial in shaping and leading these units.
Culturally Wide Delivery Aperture
Success criteria drift from original corporate intentions is a significant challenge many growing organizations face. As wins pile up, leaders need to be identified and promoted. The goals set for these leaders are often hastily configured and susceptible to narrow interpretation. To succeed, less well-rounded leaders get hyper-focused on these imperfect goals to climb the next rung of the corporate ladder. The result is as predictable as it is unintended: do what it takes to meet the leader’s promotion goals, even if that comes at the expense of the broader team or corporate goals.
Accelerator Teams help overcome this challenge by steeping team members in a team-first, big-picture delivery perspective. By practicing autonomy and having generalist experience, Accelerator Teams are bred to see and put team needs above their own. This results-oriented approach implicitly earns respect and trust from peers. It also creates a cultural firewall that promotes sustained success founded on the team’s overall success.
This firewall works in two ways. First, as noted above, Accelerator Teams release leadership-ready candidates into the organization. These resources are more likely to bring a wide aperture to their role. Second, even when not in overt leadership positions, Accelerants often make for natural leaders with the gravitas needed to sway and counter those with motivations that deviate from the organizational mission.
Some clients worry that this approach will breed conflict. Our experience says otherwise. Most leaders, even those with an aperture focused more narrowly, implicitly understand that keeping their natural leaders happy is the most straightforward path to success. As a result, this approach generally leads to less conflict and a more natural path towards the company’s goals.4
Summary: Use Accelerator Teams to Drive Quality at Scale
Accelerator Teams help combat the primary challenges to scaling by breaking up the challenges found when trying to grow in a “business as usual” manner:
Autonomous resources set the tone, drive impact, and make it easier to split and reform teams in an effective manner.
Specializing generalists have experience across project roles, positioning them to help adopt team norms that deliver impact and avoid purely ceremonial norms.
The broad aperture driven by autonomy and specializing generalist experience creates a cultural firewall founded on business impact.
We have laid out our high-level Accelerator Team process precisely because we are professionals who love to deliver high-impact results and grow our team members. We welcome and encourage you to try this process in your organization!
Need Help Implementing Accelerator Teams?
Having lived this experience many times, we also understand how difficult it is to be the change agent to drive this concept to reality. This has led us to offer this concierge temp-to-perm service to companies - complete with turn-key staffing/delivery services where we:
Serve as your mentors for your Accelerator Team
Recruit and staff the Accelerator Team
Execute with the team to deliver your project
Transition resources into your organization over time
This modern approach to temp-to-perm staffing provides double the value to your organization. Most temp-to-perm services generically search for resumes they believe match your needs and then pressure you to convert their sub-contractors. We go further by hiring those people, training them, learning how they can best drive value through active delivery, and then transitioning them to your organization. And we do this while providing direct delivery service so you also get a tangible business outcome. This approach injects strong, demonstrable skills into your organization without over-stressing your existing internal mentors. Reach out to info@codifyiq.com for more information.
Attribution: Social media cheetah image courtesy of Running Stock photos by Vecteezy
An 80/20 split is generous on many projects and can be more like a 90/10 split. Don’t believe us? Think about not just the number of resources that tend to impact a BAU team but also how much impact those resources provide.
There are many reasons why this can happen, ranging from lack of visibility to empire building.
On compact delivery teams, members will be more generalists than specialists. As project size increases, specialization will increase as well.
In some cases, conflict can occur. Organizations need to determine if they would rather avoid conflict and promote leaders focused on individual success or have a positive conflict that recenters expectations.