Building a new team

In this use case we looks at an existing company that wants to build a new team or task force. teamdecoder is especially helpful in this situation, as the team can start buidling the roles, circles and also individual tasks from scratch and build the system further while it expands. We recommend that these teams validate the status quo in teamdecoder at least once a week and adpat it to their needs.

Many companies build temporary teams, so called task forces, for special topics, to find solutions or ways to go ahead. This could be trending topics like AI or the next product iteration. Often these task forces then start permanent teams. This folowing example works for both cases.

Let's say this company was always very product and sales driven and marketing was something that was done everywhere and nowhere. So at one point the management decided to build a marketing department. They hire one person to do that, and this person first takes an external consultant (like me ;) at their side to make a plan. Soon it becomes clear, that there are two main fields that need to be reflected in the new marketing department:

1. Strategic topics, like brand, research, building a digital instrastructur with a webiste and social media channels as well as a campaign plan with the objective to reach various target groups with various goals.
2. Day-today work, like supporting the internal product and sales department, streamlining everything they have done in the past, setup some ground rules like CI and CD, etc.

For the 2nd part they hire a second person and then each one makes a plan for their area, finally they hire each one more person to support them, bringing us to a status quo where we jump in with teamdecoder.

And this could look like this:

For now they have created 3 circles:

A circle for the strategic work:

• Members are the first hire, their support person and a third currently "vacant" position that they foresee (in real life you would of yourse use their real names ;)
• And they start with 3 projects: A quantitaive study, the new website and a first campaign

A circle for the daily work:

• Members are the 2nd hire, their support person and a third currently "vacant" position that they foresee 
• And they start with 2 projects: New design guidelines and the takeover of all things marketing from the products and sales departments who used to do this themselves

A third circle as Marketing Management Circle

• they decided that it would make sense if they met just the 2 of them to discuss the overall department development and strategy and what and how to report to their leadership

Next step: roles

Now it makes sense to define who does what, and who plays what role in what circle and how to spread the workload on all existing shoulders. Here are some ideas that this team could come up with:

These roles that can then ...

• be attributed to the people and
• be attributed to the circles (which one is in strategy and which one in daily?

Now, everytime the team discusses who will do that new thing on the table, they varify, if mytpt. already tells them which role this would be. If there is more than 1 person owner of this role, the role ownwers have to devide who does it depending on their workload or capabilities.

If it is not clear who does this, the team has to adjust teamdecoder

• either create a new role or
• add a task to an existing role

Every role hold endless place for tasks - so when a task is at hand decide what role to add it to, and only if no role matches your idea, create a new one.

Make teamdecoder an integral part of the organisation of this team. 

Make sure you decide and document together who does what. This will also help you to create the profiles of the new hires you will soon need. Look at the report link of the vacant person and there you have your job description for the ads on Monster and LinkedIn!

More questions? Please use the chat on the bottom right of this page or write us an email to helpdesk@teamdecoder.com