Assemble a Skilled, Strategy Team

When I realized the idea aligned with our CIO’s key strategies and had potential for big benefits to my organization, I pulled a few of the best network engineers I could find together for weekly meetings to formulate a plan. After several months of analysis and crafting a plan with milestones, tasks and activities, our action plan began to take shape.  Since our meeting objective was aligned with CIO vision to reduce operating expense, I took the opportunity at the beginning of each meeting to motivate the team by reminding them of this important fact. As Daniel Pink points out in his best selling book, “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us,” studies by sociologist over the past 50 years have confirmed over and over again that innovative, creative thinking is sparked by autonomy, mastery, and higher purpose. We had plenty of autonomy and continuous mastery and our CIO’s key strategy to reduce cost structure was our higher purpose.

Quantifying cost savings, the scope of work, and the schedule were our initial focus. Naturally, the team’s enthusiasm grew as we began to see more and more how our work would improve the organization. The initial scope was regional cost savings, but as we produced more promising results, senior managers agreed to expand the scope to the entire enterprise and requested an action plan.  At this point the resource plan took center stage.

Overtime, our efforts blossomed into a multi-year, multi-million dollar cost savings initiative that helped achieve one of my organization’s key strategies (for details click here). Have you tried to bring together an experienced team to explore a new organizational strategy or improvement? Were you successful? If so, how? If not, what obstacles did you encounter?