Medisys: Team Assignment

MediSys: Team Assignment

Team 1

4/12/2015

Christopher DiPesa

Robbin Reese Rodriguez

Ryan Samz

Tinere Jackson

The IntensCare Product Development Team was created with the intent of speeding up development, which should significantly reduce time to market. The IntensCare project met the criteria in which utilizing a team would work: it required a variety of functional knowledge areas and skills, interdependent tasks, and the company would benefit from the outcome. (Bauer)  Elements of a high performance team were taken into consideration.  Members were selected for their varying and necessary skill sets, the team was given a clear purpose and direction with a sense of urgency, and there was given shared leadership roles. (Katzenbach and Smith)

Beaumont developed a cross functional team with the intent of creating a high performance team.  Beaumont chose members from key functional areas that had the “potential for performance advantage” as described in the course online material. Beaumont selected team members based on skill and skill potential. (Katzenbach and Smith) Beaumont realized there is no team that has any success without all the necessary skills for meeting its purpose and performance goals.

Beaumont gave the team a high level objective:  “Launch an innovative, world-class MediSys product by August 2009”.  The overall goal is to create a new, innovative monitoring system that contained features based on customer feedback. Beaumont further motivated the group with a sense of urgency by establishing a meaningful rationale and understands the team will work hard under this compelling context. The team members believed the first to market effort to be a worthwhile purpose and are committed to the overall goal. Beaumont shared the competitive landscape and made a significant investment into the product.  He ensured that the team understood the competition is planning to launch similar systems with the year. Beaumont emphasized that MediSys must be first to market and they must be mistake free. The project met the criteria of a SMART goal, which is the definition of an effective goal that motivates.

Beaumont approached the IntensCare project with a sense of urgency. The pressing and challenging nature of the project creates a high level of commitment from members and is important to team performance. This objective was the basis in which the team could develop a common purpose. The team understood the significant impact on the organization this product would have, which is the first step in creating shared responsibility within the team.

Beaumont secured and committed an additional $20 million to support the rapid development of IntensCare. It is important for Beaumont to support the team working towards the goals he has set. Organizational support is important in maintaining enthusiasm and high levels of performance.  Typically, teams will become frustrated without sufficient support from the business.  The key support here is extra funds to provide the team with training or technical consultation and material resources.

Beaumont further supported the team by formalizing a process for product development. He believed that MediSys could be more agile and speedier than the competition in product development through the use of cross-functional teams and parallel development process.  Parallel development required the team members to think more about the bigger picture rather than what is right in front of them and within their functional area. Beaumont established this process to support the teams working on developing the new product.

What Did Not Work

The executive team show traits of becoming dysfunctional. Members are becoming frustrated with each other due to conflicts between personalities, points of view as well as individual goals and critical paths to launch.  Team members doubt each other’s ability to deliver on time and with an expected high level of quality.

When Beaumont initially started to create his team it looks like he followed Katzenback’s and Smith’s team disciplines five characteristics.  Those five characteristics are: 1. a meaningful common purpose that the team has helped shape. 2. Specific performance goals that flow from the common purpose.  3. A mix of complementary skills.  4. A strong commitment to how the work gets done.  5.  Mutual accountability. (Katzenbach and Smith) Beaumont was successful with the first four characteristics but it was soon obvious that the fifth one was lacking. 

The team was unable to address issues and problems as they arose.  The team began to struggle and fall behind schedule. It also reduced their ability to overcome the issues together by not having a shared responsibility.  The team was created to have members work cross functionally in multiple critical paths but this was not happening.  The individual members began to focus on their own critical path and this only exasperated the situation.

Another issue was that Beaumont did not set specific goals.  He did however establish the IntensCare project long-term goal as: “Launch and innovative, world-class MediSys product by August 2009.”  Beaumont never set milestones or functional area deliverables and achievements. The lack of small, specific goals lead to poor performance from the group.  If small goals are achieved in the project and noticed by management and other team members, it keeps an uplifting feeling for the group.  A team cannot form without being driven together by attempting to achieve optimal performance related results.