GOVERNMENT SOLUTIONS

	Training
	General Business Courses

Improving Communication between Technical and Non-technical Teams Cont.
- One-Day Seminar

Program Number: PMGMAC
PDUs: 6

1.0 Introduction

• Seminar member introduction and overview of course material.

2.0 Why Teams are Important

• Discuss Interdependent, interrelated nature of enterprise undertakings
• Importance of having representatives from various areas across the organization work together to arrive at truly integrated solutions, which meets the needs of diverse customers, is explored in-depth
• Concept of ‘distributed cognition’ is introduced to help clarify the role of the team in facilitating knowledge capture, transfer, and institutionalization.

3.0 Defining the Work

• Teams are formed for the purpose of accomplishing organizational work.
• Emphasis on the need for the team to understanding the goals and objectives of the organizational undertaking for which the team is brought into  existence.
• Understanding the team is formed for the purpose of carrying out work, which fulfills the needs of internal and external customers.
• Understanding the responsibility of the team to clearly conceptualize what the undertaking is about is  strongly emphasized from the outset.

  Group exercise on dealing with defining the work for a project team

4.0 Roles and Responsibilities

• Establishing team members’ roles and responsibilities to ensuring that the work gets done.
• Understanding team roles and work roles
• Understanding your responsibilities to the  organization as a whole as well as to external customers, fulfilling these various responsibilities  often leads to conflicts
• Explore the nature of conflicts and will provide suggestions for how to address them.
• Understanding the team members' responsibility to address such conflicts, and to communicate with the team as well as other stakeholders, is emphasized.
• Learn skills and techniques relevant to these matters will be practiced and reinforced through group exercises.

5.0 Teams versus Groups

• Learn the difference between Teams and Groups
• Teams will be presented as—Small organizational   units established to draw upon the talents and   abilities of their members to accomplish more than   the individuals, alone, could accomplish
• Groups will be presented as—Collections of individuals, which often result in collective behavior patterns representative of a lower intelligence quotient than the individuals who make up the collection.

  Group exercise in teams versus groups

6.0 Team Communication

• Team communications will be addressed utilizing the approaches of Keith Devlin (author of Logic and Information and Info Sense) and R. Meredith Belbin (author of Management teams: Why the Succeed or Fail and Beyond the Team).
• Common causes of miscommunication will be explored (Building upon the principles of Situational Logic (a mathematical model of information—flow)
• Learn techniques for avoiding such miscommunications will be introduced.
• Methods and techniques borrowed from Soft Systems Methodology will also be utilized (and practiced) as a means of improving communication with respect to complex, technical issues.

Group exercise on team communication

7.0 Modeling and Tracking Work

• Learn how to model and track the team work to make sure it is getting done efficiently and effectively.
• Methods will be discussed for how to model the undertaking and use the model to track what is being accomplished.
• Learn how to address and track “issues” that arise as the Team goes about doing its work will also be discussed.

8.0 Evaluating the Team's Performance

• Learn methods for capturing the lessons learned from working as a team and sharing them across the organization will be discussed.
• Whenever Teams carry out organizational work, they should be able to learn from the experience.

  Group exercise on evaluating the team’s performance