Strategy Sub-Team

[gblake]

Ask yourself (or the team) who is going to consume the ___ group's outputs (fill in the blank with "strategy subteam" or with any other group's name).

If no one wants, or if no one will use, what that ____ group produces, someone's time is being wasted (or several someones' time). That leads to all sorts of predictable results.

So, if you look through this end of the telescope, no matter how your team has been organized or will be organized, you don't need a strategist until someone says "I need the answer to X, and I think the answer depends on the strategy we are going to use." At that point, and not before, you need an individual or group able to answer that strategic question competently.

Having a gut feeling that "strategy" is a good thing is very different from actually using the results of developing a strategy. Also, what someone needs (because someone else says they need it) is not the same thing as something they will actually use.

In some teams, strategic geniuses and the results they produce would be totally wasted, because no one feels the need to have (someone else's) strategic thinking affect what they are doing. In other teams, a good strategist is considered worth their weight in gold.

I'll bet that if you assign team members to jobs using this sort of thought process, and iterate a few times, you will eventually be happy with the result. You will have people producing the answers or the items that your team is actually going to use to accomplish the things your team wants to do.

Blake
PS: I am a definite believer in translating a selected strategy into requirements, and then turning those requirements into a design. I also know it is a hard thing to do to get a herd of cats to understand the differences between those three things, and actually follow a process that keeps them separate and in-order. However, I think the payoff is worth the investment.