Impasse: A critical project has hit a technical impasse - a seemingly impossible situation. Your people think the businesses
objectives cannot be met in time. You have a hunch otherwise. All the information is conflicting. How to resolve - fast?
Growing Concern: You are building a concern with R&D performance: new products are usually late to market, often with compromised specifications; there are questions about product reliability; R&D people are defensive and drop into 'technospeak' when questioned about delivery performance; some aspects of customer satisfaction are reportedly fragile; new product production start-up is slow. Are expectations unreasonable ? How is a judgement of R&D group performance to be made ?
Interactions: Sales and Marketing are constantly battling R&D. Things fall between the cracks. There is a lack of trust. What should you do ?
Underachievement: Your business never seems to meet the promise of the Vision - somehow it chronically underachieves. You have the people; there is a market; the money is there - but now things must gel !
Sluggish: Your sales staff now have the orders in view. But - you believe that your teams don't function as teams; the business
is slow and unfocussed in its responses to changes, challenges and opportunities. Who can get the design teams to deliver the promise of team working - fast ?
Inefficiency: You sense that greater R&D efficiency is possible - but everybody seems to be working flat out. Is R&D churning
because business objective achievement is not tightly focused ? Is energy being devoted to delivering what the market does not want ? Is R&D being satisfied by its own objectives, not those of the business
?
Unpredictability: Nobody in the business speaks of risks - yet product performance and schedule attainment is unpredictable. Where is the
fear and why does it exist ? Who can measure and communicate the risks in business terms ?
Attitudes: R&D people seem sullen and alienated - there is no excitement. Yet you believe there is an exciting and rewarding challenge
for the business and for the people. What is wrong ? How do you fix the problem and the system that created it ?
Fatigue: Your once exciting young business is now into its third round of products. Somehow the sparkle that was there at 1x people is
fading at 4x headcount. Yet you know the sparkle must be reborn for success against younger businesses. How are you going to achieve this rebirth ?
Conflicting Information: You, once again, face an irresolvable quandary - technical targets, project schedules, customer needs, cost objectives all conflict - your people provide answers and information - but nobody has integrated, consistent solutions.
Pateo resolves these situations using a variety of intensive, directed, micro- and macro- level communication techniques. Some of these techniques are outlined in Article 4 and Article 8. All are directed at (i) getting rapid, pragmatic results by exploiting information already in-house and (ii) leaving knowledge, solutions and decisions in the hands of your people.
Identifying specific interpersonal and inter-group issues that block information transfer - resolving them using fast moving
techniques.
Critical technical and business decision support - extracting real information.
Ongoing project risk evaluation and risk alleviation - providing calibrated data to management.
Critical meeting facilitation - asking everybody the tough questions without generating alienation.
Identifying internal communication issues - how are people actually communicating and what are they actually
communicating.
Team and individual mentoring - persuading the critical data out of people.
Team leadership-motivation - persuading everybody to share the same context and verifying that sharing is complete.
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Pateo also facilitates meetings and develops custom workshops on these topics.