1.1 Team mobilization

Make sure you have the right people in the right room, all pulling in the same direction. It's crucial to the success of your project.

Introduction

I recall joining a customer project some years back that resembled an airborne forces deployment. Airborne forces are ground combat units carried by aircraft and airdropped into battle zones. This style of deployment is horrible for just about any project, except actual military operations.

In this project, we didn’t even get a briefing or any “advance intel.” Myself and a few other lucky souls were basically dropped at our customer site on short notice, having been told we were joining the team to “make a difference.”

On day one, nobody knew who we were. We didn’t really know what we were doing there, except — presumably — that our skills would be useful. Our project manager wasn’t much better off although, to be fair, he was pretty excited to have some new butts to put in chairs and help with the workload.

Half the folks we met didn’t know most of the other folks working the site. Nobody seemed to have a clear picture of how their little slice of work fit in. It was, in short, a mess — and to this day, I remember what it was like to be shoved out the back of a metaphorical airplane and told to “make a difference,” with no briefing, no context, no clarity at all.

Before getting started mobilizing your team, everything needs to be ready. In broad strokes, this means we need to have a clear idea of who our customer is, what value we expect to bring, and how we’re going to do it. By “how we’re going to do it,” I broadly mean what our scope of work is, and who is going to contribute to that effort.

It’s a high level understanding and will definitely change as we dive deeper with our customer — but having this basic understanding helps us set up for success. You’d be surprised how often teams show up without even basic context about the project and customer.

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