Example Project Assignments
Literally, there is no end to the number of possible projects your teams might tackle. Projects that cross functional boundaries are plentiful in all organizations – and many are opportunities with substantial potential impact. Below are just two illustrations of possible project assignments.
Example: Customer-driven product changes
The team members recognize their company tends to pay lip service only to the importance of understanding customer needs. They define a project within a part of the company experiencing particularly rapidly evolving customer priorities. They select the customer segments, develop the research methods, collect the information, and feed it into a voice-of-the-customer matrix (a tool presented in the operations module). The team's analysis highlights several significant gaps in the product features given this fresh research into customer needs. Top management agrees these changes are overdue, and is pleased to see that these up-and-coming employees have learned a key lesson for the future of the company.
Example: Key process performance scorecard
A team identifies an organizational core process that crosses a number of functional boundaries. Because this process spans the company, subsections of the process have been optimized at the department level. Overall performance of the process is not optimal and a growing competitive limitation. The team members unite to create a scorecard of metrics that track the performance of the process as a whole. They link the previous department-level measurements to the new full-process metrics in ways that promote collaboration, not competition. (Note: Given organizational readiness, the development of a comprehensive Balanced Scorecard framework could become an integrating focus for AL teams, following participants' conceptual orientation in the four BSL modules, which "map" directly onto, and congruently underpin, the four Balanced Scorecard constructs.)
Site last updated April 1, 2010