360 degree visbility

Tools are a highly effective yardstick for understanding what’s happening within an organisation. A good tool can almost immediately reveal several key indicators:

• Are people inputting information into the tool?
• Are people using the tool as part of their process?
• Are teams on the ground aligned with the organisation’s priorities?
• Do people work in teams or merely as colleagues?

The first and most important element when it comes to tools is ensuring good hygiene factors and avoiding the “garbage in, garbage out” scenario.

To achieve this, the use of tools should reflect a team that has already gone through the process of formation, is aligned in purpose, and is working cohesively.

In other words, a tool serves two primary purposes in an organisation: it helps people be more productive, and it acts as a barometer for the organisation’s overall effectiveness.

Setting up a tool effectively requires careful consideration of:

• organisational priorities
• how those priorities are cascaded through teams
• the ways of working that support alignment around those priorities
• reporting on the progress of teams in relation to organisational goals

Tools can also streamline how information is documented, how decisions are signed off, and how software deployment and ticketing are managed — both internally and externally (in a support context).

Tooling also moves communication out of the realm of meetings, emails, and video calls, into structured checklists assigned to people, with dates and task states such as:

• To do
• Doing
• Awaiting feedback
• Blocked
• Done

There’s no doubt that tooling is incredibly challenging to implement, and we’ll explore this further when discussing the challenges of technology deployments.