visibility and promotion of your team inside company how to sell results of your team?

Visibility and promotion of your team inside Company

How to sell results of your team?

Sergiy Tkachuk serg.tk{at}gmail.com http://sergtk.com

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Table of content

•Experience and applicability•Goals of promotion•News = blogs + subscriptions•Presentations•Project management•Questionnaire•Inside team•Tricks•New projects•Cautions•Ideas for improvements


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Experience and Applicability

Most effective - for teams which develop core competence products.Experience: product company with own products, internal users, team – core competence, 1000 employees.

End users

Team

PdMPdM

BBBB

UserUser

PjMPjM

Cust

Cust

Sales


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•More choices of projects •Do more important projects, not first ones•Easy to solve your and your team’s issues•Benefit for overall company•Build your career

Symptoms of needs:•Filling that projects are not actual•Not all projects are used in end user products•Responses from customers with long delay

Goals of Promotions

Customerneed:

Developercan:


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News - foundation

News = Blog + Notifications

Blog – easy to look through the team life

Notifications – don’t forget about the team


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News - audience

Managers Developers Team

Users/Customers


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• Something new? Publish – share knowledge with others.

• Habit: if you want to send mail, think about publishing (publish and refer)

• If you refer to news, propose to subscribe (one click!)

• Start: after several publications ask target audience to subscribe.

• Once a year or half a year – ask to subscribe again whom you consider your target audience.

• Ask your potential target audience to subscribe based on position (Who is Who services).

• First post – Purpose of the subscription/blog.• After half a year you will have a lot info in blog

News - support


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• Publish or not publish? – not publish• Checklist:

new feature, status (release, prototype, beta,…), picture (input/output), products or customers use/will use, human readable small description of feature purpose, which problem of customer it solves, how to try, reference to project documents, ask about suggestions and feedbacks.

• Don’t drill into details• Write as for children – keep it simple, but with love

News for users/clients/customers


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• Changes in interfaces• Small new features especially if it is internal

product.• New cool tools, libraries which could be useful for

other teams as well.• Solved technical issues and tricky approaches

News for developers


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• New people, positions.• Team extensions, • Numbers available (e.g. KPI values)

News for managers


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• Collect long term changes, conventions, agreements• Other teams have similar issues – suggestion to

subscribe in case of interest• Subscribe your team mates (obligatory) and

immediate managers.

News for team


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Presentations

•Source of Info: from News for customers•Same presentations for different audience – groups of similar people – it is easy to start discussion.•Encourage discussions, don’t stop, just listen and ask. •If you answer questions – ask a question •Publish presentation files, impression of audience in the news.•You discover weaknesses in your projects during preparation.


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Project management and promotion

•Keep your information available•High level long term planning•Prioritized and available short term planning•Additional benefit: your team concentrates on most important things•Several customers can decide what is more important•Report to your immediate boss(es) weekly or biweekly using simple language (past/future/red).


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High level planning

• Plan 1 year ahead.• Target audience: managers and customers. This is

really important here.• You should teach how to interpret your planning

(better then absence of plans at all)• Update: 1 per month


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Questionnaire

•Questionnaire helps to understand directions which are important for the company•Columns: Question, Current status (5 – good, 0 – bad), Important for you (5 – important, 0 –not important), Comment.•“If you have no ideas how to fill specific fields please skip it or ask me about details.”•“Please forward this e-mail to persons who might be interested”•Publish overall results on manager news.•Answer personally for comments. People - alive


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Inside team

•Easy to work with result oriented team•Explain to team importance of feature for customers•Delegate if somebody interested, but describe first.•Difficult when people do not want to change.•Team become automous – able to find project.•Team may not understand what you are doing – developers like projects, not a users


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Tricks

•Invite people to make presentation for your team, especially users.•Mail signature: Left: Sergiy Tkachuk, TL, blah-blah-blahRight: Picture and “What to know about team? Subscribe - link”.•Visit other presentation.•Have things in order to provide links in any moment and to give to others ability to look through your site.•Ask about potential ideas – potential users should not afraid to look stupid with crude ideas.•Improve your understand how company works and remove intermediate chunks in communication.


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New projects

•Ask users – propose to bosses•WTF from users•Kitchen•Ask bosses about some freedom to use time for new projects – it was not issue in my situation•Promotion should result in good personal or team network, people are open, people know who you are, people propose projects for you.


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Cautions

•Nobody can do this for you•This requires time at the beginning, but it worth to do!•You immediate bosses can miss your company wide activity :)•Be ready to prioritize your tasks – you may receive a lot-lot requests.•Extend your team. •Promotion effect becomes visible after 0.5 – 1 year•Promotion itself is not a result.•It might become obvious for you that coding from your side is inefficient time spending.•You will do “correct” things slower than “incorrect” thing


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Ideas for improvements•Wiki (searchable storage of information)•Forum•Immediate communication with users, sales, customers•Keep track that results of your team are used by end users•Monthly meetings with TLs of related teams/departments•Statistics – how many people read news, see plans…


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• Be alive• Be open• Your audience - real people• Make experiments• Better to be happy than serious

Final notes


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Will be glad to answer your questions!

Thank you!

visibility and promotion of your team inside company how to sell results of your team?

Documents

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