Jean Sebastien Charest - High Performing Teams and the Skills Challenges of Digital Transformation

Summary

Jean Sebastien Charest discusses the importance of high-performing, empowered, multi-disciplinary teams, particularly in the context of digital transformation. He emphasizes the need to shift from traditional project-based teams to feature-centric teams, fostering collaboration between IT and business sectors. This approach requires balancing technical and non-technical skills, promoting ownership, and adapting to change. Charest highlights the essential nature of embracing both specialists and generalists within teams to enhance autonomy and effectiveness. He underscores the value of curiosity and adaptability in encouraging team members to explore and excel in various roles, contributing significantly to the success of digital transformation initiatives.

Highlights

• Multi-disciplinary teams empower organizations to navigate digital transformation effectively. 🔄
• Feature-centric teams prevent the dismantling of expertise post-project, maintaining focused capabilities. 🔧
• Balancing budgets and resources in IT requires strategic planning, often likened to the 'Hunger Games'. 🎯
• Automation and generalist skills reduce dependency on highly specialized roles. 🤖
• Curiosity fuels versatility, enabling professionals to adapt to dynamic technological landscapes. 🌍

Key Takeaways

• High-performing, multi-disciplinary teams are crucial for successful digital transformation. 🚀
• Feature-centric teams foster better collaboration between IT and business sectors. 🤝
• Balancing technical and non-technical skills enhances agility and responsiveness. ⚖️
• Emphasizing ownership and accountability promotes effective decision-making. 🏆
• Curiosity and adaptability are vital for professional growth and team success. 🌱

Overview

In the fast-paced world of digital transformation, Jean Sebastien Charest passionately advocates for high-performing, multi-disciplinary teams. Moving away from traditional, siloed project teams, he highlights the effectiveness of feature-centric, empowered teams that blend IT and business expertise. This structure not only supports ongoing project development but also ensures a seamless evolution of capabilities, reducing conflicts and enhancing collaboration.

Charest draws attention to the strategic management of IT investments, humorously dubbing the annual budget allocations as akin to the 'Hunger Games'. He emphasizes the importance of strategic feature-centric teams, which allow organizations to continuously iterate and adapt without the inefficiencies of dismantling teams post-project. This approach demands a blend of specialist and generalist skills, fostering an environment where team members can thrive across various roles.

The future, as Charest envisions, is one where automation and skill adaptability are key. Encouraging curiosity and a willingness to explore different technological domains, Charest underscores the importance of developing versatile professionals capable of navigating the ever-changing landscapes of IT and business. His vision is one of shared accountability and continuous growth, crucial for any organization striving to succeed in digital transformation.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Multi-Disciplinary Teams The chapter introduces the concept of multi-disciplinary teams, emphasizing their empowerment and high performance. It discusses the significance of these teams and provides guidance for individuals interested in developing such teams.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Evolution of Team Structures The chapter explores the evolution of team structures, particularly focusing on the development of multidisciplinary teams over the past 20 years. It discusses how the advent of the internet led many companies to form specialized teams centered around IT and project management, adapting annually to new challenges and advancements.
• 01:30 - 02:30: Project Funding and Decision Making The chapter discusses the process of budgeting for IT investments, highlighting the challenge of balancing ongoing maintenance ('run your grow') with transformative projects. Decision-making is emphasized, particularly when dealing with a limited budget, using a hypothetical example of allocating a $100 million budget amidst $250 million in project requests. This process is humorously compared to 'The Hunger Games,' where tough choices must be made to prioritize which projects receive funding.
• 02:30 - 03:30: Conflicts in Traditional Team Models The chapter titled 'Conflicts in Traditional Team Models' discusses the challenges associated with the conventional method of forming teams for projects. Each year, teams are assembled based on projects that are pledged, often for arbitrary reasons. The process involves setting a scope, calendar, and budget for a project and then managing these elements over a period, typically two years. Teams are primarily composed of IT personnel, which may lead to various conflicts and challenges.
• 03:30 - 04:30: Building Feature-Centric Teams The chapter emphasizes the need for multi-disciplinary teams in organizations, particularly in contexts like banking where various specialized systems such as credit and underwriting systems are present. It highlights past challenges faced due to lack of synergy between business teams and technical teams, especially during phases like testing, which often led to unmet expectations and conflicts. By building feature-centric teams that combine business and technical expertise, organizations can better align their operations and expectations, leading to more effective outcomes.
• 04:30 - 05:30: Ownership and Accountability Shift The chapter "Ownership and Accountability Shift" discusses the necessity of sustained investment in risk systems for the future. It emphasizes the need for establishing permanent feature-centric teams, which include both IT personnel and product owners. Instead of the traditional model of assembling teams for a project and disbanding them afterwards, the chapter suggests maintaining these teams continuously to enhance capabilities and ensure seamless operations.
• 05:30 - 06:30: Collaboration in IT and Operations This chapter explores the dynamics of collaboration between IT and operations teams within businesses. It highlights the importance of involving people with field experience and current process knowledge to drive improvement. The focus is on assembling a team committed to ongoing work, managing investment, and maintaining a backlog that guides their efforts. The narrative emphasizes flexibility in the project scope, as it can change based on evolving needs, ensuring teams have a steady stream of work to iterate on.
• 06:30 - 07:30: Skills Challenges in Digital Transformation The chapter titled 'Skills Challenges in Digital Transformation' discusses the need for agile and adaptable teams in long-term projects. The text highlights the importance of teams embracing change rather than seeing it as a disruption. It stresses that changes in a project should not threaten the team's timeline or project scope, urging the need for teams to focus on the right priorities consistently. This requires ownership from the business side, emphasizing that IT professionals should not be the sole accountable parties in technological projects. The summary reflects on fostering a collaborative environment where changes are seamlessly integrated to benefit overall project success and adapt to dynamic business needs.
• 07:30 - 08:30: Importance of Generalists in Cross-Functional Teams This chapter discusses the challenges faced by IT departments when they are unable to upgrade their systems for several years, leading to a situation where they fall multiple versions behind. As a result, major upgrades become necessary, requiring operations to be frozen for extended periods, which introduces significant risks. Moreover, it touches on the annual budget struggles where important upgrade projects often get sidelined, reflecting on the operational and strategic shifts required to address these issues.
• 08:30 - 09:30: Automation and Continuous Learning The chapter emphasizes the importance of maintaining risk engines through a business-oriented perspective. It discusses building multi-disciplinary teams to foster empathy, collaboration, and ownership within businesses. The narrative advocates for smaller, consistent investments in maintaining these systems, clearly articulating the total cost of ownership to business owners, who are ultimately responsible for these capabilities.
• 09:30 - 10:30: Adapting to New Technologies The chapter 'Adapting to New Technologies' discusses the importance of strategic decision-making in investments, especially in the context of cloud computing. Unlike traditional on-premise data centers with fixed costs, cloud services offer a pay-as-you-go model, demanding careful risk assessment and financial planning. This shift emphasizes the need for businesses to adapt their strategies to manage operational costs effectively while leveraging technological advancements.
• 10:30 - 11:30: Curiosity and Adaptability in IT Roles This chapter discusses the importance of curiosity and adaptability in IT roles. As businesses increasingly leverage cloud technology, the costs associated can rise. While it's essential to support these choices with a business case, it's ultimately not the IT department's responsibility to decide infrastructure utilization. Instead, implementing showback and chargeback systems makes business lines accountable for their choices. Consequently, a multidisciplinary approach is crucial, reflecting the universal evolution of businesses today.

Jean Sebastien Charest - High Performing Teams and the Skills Challenges of Digital Transformation Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 one of the things you've talked about has been multi-disciplinary teams you mentioned them earlier in our discussion uh particularly empowered uh high-performing multi-disciplinary teams uh can you talk about a bit about what you do with those and the what guidance you would have for people who wanted to develop them in
• 00:30 - 01:00 their own organization yep so multidisciplinary team you know we haven't invented you know something new but you know over the course of time and in the past 20 years where you know internet brought a lot of companies to put together teams around i.t and and project management we were in a world where every year you say hey
• 01:00 - 01:30 this is my budget for it investments and you you have your run your grow right you can you continue to upgrade your licenses and you know obsolescence and your growing existing but you also want to transform on other stuff so you make decisions right let's say you have a 100 million dollar envelope you're going to decide of course there's going to be business lines and people coming up with their own projects so it's probably going to be 250 million dollar ask and then you need to narrow it down to 100 million i call this the hunger games
• 01:30 - 02:00 right every year we do this and and people try to pledge for for for what they want to do and so so you build so you accept a bunch of projects for good or bad reasons and then and then you build teams you build project teams of saying hey here's your scope your calendar your budget and then you know try to manage that triangle for the next two years you have your money and then and then you build the team and then and then this team is a sample of mostly i.t people and then you're gonna ask you
• 02:00 - 02:30 know business folks to chip in on business requirements sometimes during testing and it led to a lot of conflict and to a lot of them um low uh you know not meeting expectations a lot so so building these multi-disciplinary team were were sort of taking the issue the other way around and we're saying hey we're a bank we have credit systems we have underwriting systems we have you know
• 02:30 - 03:00 risk systems these systems no matter what we're going to want to do in every year for the foreseeable future we will need to invest in this we have a website we have a mobile app so so instead of building these teams and then dismantling them at the end of the project right because there's no money and then you sort of ship it to to ops you say no let's build capabilities feature-centric teams made up of yes i.t people but product owners
• 03:00 - 03:30 and people from the business people that have field experience people that have you know that's lived the process of today that we want to improve and say you know what for the next foreseeable future this team will have a lot of work to do and then so you build the backlog around that product and then the way that you look at your yearly investment then it becomes a question of managing the workload that you're sending to these teams but they they always have a backlog to iterate on and the scope can change because let me tell you something
• 03:30 - 04:00 your two three year project the scope will change anyways so so you want to have these teams that are able to embrace change and not seeing as disruptor because every change i i throw at them is going to jeopardize either their calendar or their scope so you want to make sure that they're always working on the right things and for that well you need ownership you need ownership that that comes from the business because as i.t folks for so many years we've been the ones that were accountable for saying hey now it's been
• 04:00 - 04:30 four years we haven't upgraded this system and now we're five version behind and so we're gonna need to freeze the operations for six months because we need to do this major upgrade that comes with a bunch of risk around it and and so then i t you're sort of caught you know as as the ones the folks that but a lot of the time it's just every yearly budget hunger games before your project wasn't accepted of doing an upgrade right so it's shifting the
• 04:30 - 05:00 narrative of saying hey business folks you're the risk people you want risk engines well you better make sure you maintain these engines every year and do smaller investment of making sure so so building this multi-disciplinary team around these this area of focus really builds empathy between the teams more collaboration and and the business which are at the end of the day the the owners of these capabilities you give them the real total cost of ownership they now know how much it you know and they have then
• 05:00 - 05:30 the burden of deciding on the investments you make and it's even it's it's coming even more important in the cloud world where most of the cloud solutions are sort of pay as you go because in the old days you have 200 200 servers in an on-premise data center it's paid for right so the accountants it's in the book you have your servers you use it but in the cloud world if you're you know risk analysis
• 05:30 - 06:00 designed to send models and you're using a lot of the elasticity of your cloud it's going to cost you more money now probably you can back it by a business case but it's not id that has to decide what you do with your infra we we must you know bring show back and charge back to the business lines of being able to help them accountable for this so you it cannot be not multi-disciplinary i today we need to have everybody and and let's be fair all businesses now are
• 06:00 - 06:30 it's not i.t is no longer a cost center we're a player at the strategy table so let's let's share uh the accountability on our deliverables absolutely and uh i guess overcoming the barrier that there often was there between iot and operations right exactly and it's hard for operation teams to always be on the losing end of being at the end of the process when you're normally over budget and you probably cuss caught on
• 06:30 - 07:00 cut costs on quality and stuff like that and just ship it there and then and then so you had these teams of saying hey solution and development teams you'll be you know rewarded on the number of functionalities that you deliver and and on the operation sides you'll be rewarded for the uptime of the systems and making sure that you know there is no system failures availability um you know security of the systems but at the end of the day they become risk
• 07:00 - 07:30 avert because they say hey you guys every time you introduce change i have a system failure so i don't want change and on the other side they're saying every time you want to do a change it's complicated working with these guys right so so these two worlds need to to to work in better collaborations yeah totally okay so we would usually see significant changes in skills as you change the technology and undertake transformation uh both
• 07:30 - 08:00 technical and non-technical skills often uh why to what extent has this been a challenge and have you addressed that talent and you know speaking to to students uh talent is is something that is top of mind um either for reskilling or or or or bringing today's talent in the new ways of working but also
• 08:00 - 08:30 uh you know making sure that we can we can um invest in our our talent because there's sort of i'm sort of a bit puzzled on this question mr carr because over the course of the years we sort of over specialized some of the um some of the the the work uh that we do in it meaning you know you're a firewall person so you open
• 08:30 - 09:00 ports on firewall and you make sure that the firewall is this and you and then you are a f5 person that manages telecom routers and stuff like that so so it becomes a world where every time you want to do something there's like 24 lines of work on on the end to end of what you want to do so so i i feel that today going back to these multi-disciplinary team we really need specialists on some
• 09:00 - 09:30 areas machine learning ai cyber security enterprise architecture you need specialists but more and more we need we need more generalists because because if you want these multi-disciplinary teams to work they need to be pretty autonomous right so if every time they need something they must lean on other people in the group to be able to unblock them that makes that you know either they're
• 09:30 - 10:00 not really autonomous because they always need other persons are when you build more teams you put contention points on the people that have the sole ownership or or or expertise to do stuff so the new technologies that we're seeing um you know cicd i don't know if you if you if you work into that but it's continuous integration continuous deployment or pipelines everything around automation brings us in a world where a lot of the
• 10:00 - 10:30 manual work or a lot of the heavy specialized work that is being done today is automated so the more that the talent the people that we have on our teams are able to automate most of these tasks and build on automation and routines from other teams the more autonomous they become the more generalists they become because we really need people to understand technology and just not a piece of it because that's that's harder so that's that's the way we're re-skilling people that's the way we want to work with
• 10:30 - 11:00 you know people coming out of school obviously there's a lot of specialties but you know organizations that are now counting the i.t people in the thousands um it's really important that people can do many tasks depending on what's the current challenge that we have as a group because it becomes a nightmare of capacity planning if not so i would say uh be curious because if you're curious and you touch a lot of areas then you become
• 11:00 - 11:30 somebody that that can fit in many contexts and sometimes discover stuff that you didn't even know you you wanted to do right i have have people that you know went to engineering school and they learn how to do web development and everything and once they hit my teams they become truly passionate around you know quality testing automation uh devops other stuff so there's there's you know the more people are curious and they're willing to try different stuff they become better technologists but
• 11:30 - 12:00 they're also working under in french we're saying that employability they they work on on being somebody that can that can you know play different roles in our organization yeah very interesting uh amongst the people that have been speaking to uh about digital transformation this is becoming a bit of a theme that that people who are managing digital transformation have a range of experience uh in the field or in the
• 12:00 - 12:30 organization or in the industry that they're part of so just really quite interesting that that seems to have emerged as the people who are most successful