Teamwork: Easy to Say, Hard to Do
30 August 2010
Read by 1562 persons
To successfully complete their projects, managers must know how to unite their teams. Obvious. Except that, despite good intentions, information circulates poorly, teams become dispersed, and ultimately, the company suffers.
Months of development, weeks of testing, and yet, catastrophe: last October, the launch of the website for NetMediaEurope's flagship client was a failure. It was impossible to send the announcement email to thousands of contacts. "In the team, each employee thought that the other had updated the database. Unfortunately, this was not the case!" Dominique Busso, CEO of NetMediaEurope, still recalls. "This blunder cost us €10,000 in delay penalties. Since then, we have revised our way of working. All members of a project are copied on every email exchange. And the manager is responsible for "over-validating" everything at the end."
Cacophony Between Teams
A single grain of sand is enough to jam a well-oiled machine. Economic history is full of projects that seemingly had all the guarantees of success – well-established processes, colossal budgets, abundant coordination meetings, etc. – and which end in resounding industrial failures, because companies failed to get their teams to work in harmony. The most emblematic example in recent years is that of the A380, the European air giant. Repeated delays cost Airbus no less than €2.2 billion. At the origin of the mishap: the lack of a common management software between France and Germany. While French factories used sophisticated software, the Hamburg factory recorded modifications to be made on 550 kilometers of cabling on... paper plans! The Germans also hid the difficulties they faced. "They thought they were going to solve the problems," the former head of EADS, Noël Forgeard, then justified. False excuse. They applied the well-known "umbrella" technique: when a project goes sour, the strategy is to hide the malfunctions, send dozens of emails to cover oneself, and thus avoid taking responsibility for a failure at the risk of losing one's job.
The same grimace at Boeing with its Dreamliner large-capacity aircraft project. Initially, to reduce costs, the production of materials was outsourced to the extreme: 80% of the structures were made by hundreds of subcontractors scattered across the globe. The slightest delay from one mechanically affected the others, thus disrupting the entire supply chain. Result: a delay of two and a half years on the initial schedule and a production overrun estimated at a minimum of $2.5 billion.
Lack of Communication
These serial blunders reveal a difficulty that all engineers and other managers who work in "project mode" face: getting a Chinese or Indian factory to work with a European engineer, a French producer with an American distributor. "The organization or communication methods are not the same from one culture or profession to another, which inevitably generates tensions likely to derail a project," explains Michel Kalika, director of the Strasbourg Management School. To control potential setbacks, this expert recommends "identifying risks of incidents in advance."
Logical, except that this practice is still rare. Companies often wait until they are up against the wall to act. Like this SME specializing in purchasing, weighed down by exorbitant operating costs, which decided to implement a drastic cost-cutting plan. Convinced that his team was on board, the general manager did not deem it necessary to warn them. When the cost-killer presented his diagnosis, the reception was glacial: "no buyer was ready to hear the recommendations of an outsider," explains Hicham Abbad, cost optimization specialist at KLB group in Management magazine. In the room, the discomfort was palpable." A simple communication failure that cost the company three additional months of work just to get the message across.
Posted August 30, 2010
capital.fr
Months of development, weeks of testing, and yet, catastrophe: last October, the launch of the website for NetMediaEurope's flagship client was a failure. It was impossible to send the announcement email to thousands of contacts. "In the team, each employee thought that the other had updated the database. Unfortunately, this was not the case!" Dominique Busso, CEO of NetMediaEurope, still recalls. "This blunder cost us €10,000 in delay penalties. Since then, we have revised our way of working. All members of a project are copied on every email exchange. And the manager is responsible for "over-validating" everything at the end."
Cacophony Between Teams
A single grain of sand is enough to jam a well-oiled machine. Economic history is full of projects that seemingly had all the guarantees of success – well-established processes, colossal budgets, abundant coordination meetings, etc. – and which end in resounding industrial failures, because companies failed to get their teams to work in harmony. The most emblematic example in recent years is that of the A380, the European air giant. Repeated delays cost Airbus no less than €2.2 billion. At the origin of the mishap: the lack of a common management software between France and Germany. While French factories used sophisticated software, the Hamburg factory recorded modifications to be made on 550 kilometers of cabling on... paper plans! The Germans also hid the difficulties they faced. "They thought they were going to solve the problems," the former head of EADS, Noël Forgeard, then justified. False excuse. They applied the well-known "umbrella" technique: when a project goes sour, the strategy is to hide the malfunctions, send dozens of emails to cover oneself, and thus avoid taking responsibility for a failure at the risk of losing one's job.
The same grimace at Boeing with its Dreamliner large-capacity aircraft project. Initially, to reduce costs, the production of materials was outsourced to the extreme: 80% of the structures were made by hundreds of subcontractors scattered across the globe. The slightest delay from one mechanically affected the others, thus disrupting the entire supply chain. Result: a delay of two and a half years on the initial schedule and a production overrun estimated at a minimum of $2.5 billion.
Lack of Communication
These serial blunders reveal a difficulty that all engineers and other managers who work in "project mode" face: getting a Chinese or Indian factory to work with a European engineer, a French producer with an American distributor. "The organization or communication methods are not the same from one culture or profession to another, which inevitably generates tensions likely to derail a project," explains Michel Kalika, director of the Strasbourg Management School. To control potential setbacks, this expert recommends "identifying risks of incidents in advance."
Logical, except that this practice is still rare. Companies often wait until they are up against the wall to act. Like this SME specializing in purchasing, weighed down by exorbitant operating costs, which decided to implement a drastic cost-cutting plan. Convinced that his team was on board, the general manager did not deem it necessary to warn them. When the cost-killer presented his diagnosis, the reception was glacial: "no buyer was ready to hear the recommendations of an outsider," explains Hicham Abbad, cost optimization specialist at KLB group in Management magazine. In the room, the discomfort was palpable." A simple communication failure that cost the company three additional months of work just to get the message across.
Posted August 30, 2010
capital.fr
