Something that comes up fairly frequently in my organization is the question of how to replicate success. When team A does really really well, there’s an urge to copy whatever magic it is they had. Unfortunately the approach usually devolves into how to copy the successful team, not copy the success of that team.
As an example, let’s say team A had a fantastic development lead. Somebody who could keep an eye out for development progress, overall quality, and what the customer really wanted. This development lead was granted fairly wide ranging influence over various parts of the project. They managed quality assurance, development, and were the final authority on what features made it into the project. And everything went great.
So now team B is spinning up. They have a good, but not fantastic development lead. However they do have a few quality assurance engineers who are rock stars, and a very good project manager. Should you grant the same authority to the development lead you did for team A? Of course not.
Replicating success is a matter of first getting good people. In big companies this can be fairly tough, as you usually have to play the hand you’re dealt. Teams often get paralyzed as they try to find the equivalent of the rock star development lead from team A. It’s critical to identify whether you can alter the members of the team (or to what extent you can swap out the members of the team) before planning the structure of that team.
After getting the people, the most critical factor is structuring the team so that team strengths are provided the freedom to succeed, and team weaknesses are appropriately supported. This is rarely accomplished by just applying the template from another team. The good leaders understand this, and are constantly looking for the factors that make a team successful. They then carefully consider the makeup of the next team, and put a structure in place to allow those specific team members to succeed.
