Think You Know Your Team?
When was the last time you sat down with your peers and had a discussion about their priorities? What drives your priorities and what drives those of your peers may be widely dissimilar. Time-to-market may be your watch word. Maybe up-time and availability are key for your colleague downstream and driving out costs for an associate upstream.
What if you could have a Leadership Priorities Matrix for everyone in your team? How would you approach your peers if you really knew what they wanted?
The Social-IT Game
At the beginning of 2012 Serena decided it was time to find out. So a team of very smart marketing engineers got together and created the Social IT Game.
In the Social IT Game you get to play yourself. You are faced with a number of IT challenges and asked to prioritize your responses to them. Challenges vary from game to game but include the whole gamut of topics from Demand Management to Release Management to Service Management and everything in between.
But the real fun begins when you then have to put yourself in the shoes of your peers and guess how they would prioritize their responses to the challenges.
Suddenly, development managers are faced with trying to understand how release managers would prioritize needs of the service desk community. It’s fascinating what people get right and what teams have in common. But what truly brings new clarity and real debate is in the differences and in the surprises.
Surprising Results
In one recent game the entire IT management team had strong and uniform consensus that Reduce Cycle Time to the Business was everyone’s number one priority (see graph to right). Detailed and Accurate Chargebacks was rated last for all team members. But there was clear division between the DEV and the OPS communities over the relative importance of More Business Value versus More Visibility in the release management process. And from this an informative debate ensued.
To help put the graph and scores to the right in perspective, different point totals were given to a priority based on the ranking of each participant.
In 2012 Serena conducted almost 40 of these Social IT Game events for specially invited customers and at the invitation of customers inside their own organizations. Each company received an assessment report afterwards, kind of like an IT Org Profile. Take a look at a sample report for Qlarius, a fictitious company with Doug Serena at the helm of IT.
Get Your Own Leadership Priority Matrix
Want Serena to bring the Social IT Game, along with lunch, to your IT organization? Want a Myers-Briggs IT score for your team? Contact me.
