Final Blog Post, Traditional Prompt

I have experienced participating in a successful team within an organization on campus when I had been part of a consulting team. I will try to give background information, however I may be limited in how specific I can be out of respect for the non-disclosure agreement I had signed for the project. The basis of the project was that the client had been a college in a large university and they wanted help on creating strategy in order to generate revenue for the college outside of tuition due to a low amount of revenue coming in from the usual expected sources. They also wanted to figure out strategy on how to heighten the quality as well as quantity of their application pool, since awareness of the college had been relatively low. I believe the effectiveness of the team had come from both how the hierarchy had been set up as well as how well members adhered to those roles. 

In terms of the team structure there had been about 8 people in total. When discussing the hierarchy in terms of how the authors had laid them out, it had been somewhat of a mix of a simple hierarchy as well as a dual authority. This will be better understood when I explain the individual positions. At the top of the hierarchy there had been the senior manager, who overviewed the team as well as other teams working on different projects. Under the senior manager had been the project manager, who was the main leader of the project, driving most assignments as well as guiding the direction of the project. Under the project manager had been the senior consultants, who have had experience working on projects previously and were in charge of helping lead the consultants. At the bottom, under the senior consultants, had been the consultants who worked with senior consultants guidance on research and creating effective deliverables for the client. This was a mix of simple hierarchy as well as dual hierarchy since the senior manager had been above the project manager, who had been above the senior consultants, and each of the senior consultants had been leaders for multiple consultants. I have created a visual in this post to make this understanding simpler. 

When discussing the situation in terms of Katzenbach and Smith’s writing, the team had been successful due to how well the upper management had shaped purpose in response to the demand for the project. The project manager had made very clear what the end goal of the project had been, as well as been very open to the team’s opinions on how the goal could and should be attained. This way the project manager had not been limiting, as well as he had allowed for a more efficient and synergistic approach to solving the issue at hand. Along with this, we had been able to dissect the problem using issue trees in order to be able to create specific measurable goals and make a timeline for weekly checkpoints in order to complete an impactful project within the time constraints of our time with the client. Without doing this, there would have been many inefficiencies created due to doing work that was outside of the scope of the goal of the project. Though the team had been double the size of what I had been used to for a consulting project, it had been a manageable size due to the delegation of roles within the hierarchy that provided for everyone to have a load of work and responsibility they had been able to handle. What contributed to this all had been the fact that there had been many good team mates which had encouraged everyone on the team to become good team mates. What I mean by good team mates is that there had been active effort for everyone to achieve a common goal, as well as grow professionally. Due to this there was no fear in giving necessary criticism as well as team mates receiving the criticism in a humble fashion, knowing that they had to learn in order to become better and produce a stronger impact reaching the end goal.