Stoke City Football Club, I suspect, is not something that is likely to be of much interest to many who choose to read this blog. However, every league, in every sport, in every country has a Stoke City in their midst. This is a team that is always the bridesmaid and never the bride. This is a team which makes an art form of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This is a team that can only be supported by a true optimist, one who genuinely believes that Cinderella might actually go the ball. Mind you, after many years of suffering supporting Stoke City I’ve often wondered whether the real quality needed is not optimism but rather masochism.
Nevertheless, right now supporting Stoke City has been the easiest it’s been for over 30 years. They have a side that can more-or-less hold their own in the top football league in Britain. While they are unlikely to win trophies or league titles they now win or draw more games than they lose. For a team with limited resources this is no mean achievement. Much of the credit for this must go to the team manager, Tony Pulis. Over the past eight years Pulis has rescued Stoke City from the slippery slopes of imminent oblivion and laid solid team foundations. This very much augers well for the future for Stoke City aficionados like myself.
Why though do I choose to highlight the achievements of Tony Pulis in a blog dedicated to the IT industry? The reason I do is largely the result of a discussion I have just had with a Melbourne based CIO. This CIO works in financial services. His specific sector is pretty specialised and subject to repetitive changes in government regulations. As such, it really does not lend itself to package solutions. Like all its competitors, his organisation has elected to develop and maintain their business systems in-house. Moreover, the systems are extremely complex. The CIO estimated that he oversaw more than a million lines of code.
Our discussion revolved around application development but it had wider ramifications which is where I’ll bring in Mr Pulis. This organisation has been an extremely enthusiastic supporter of Agile programming. This is an approach to application development that revolves around small teams developing and delivering new functionality in short timeframes. This CIO spoke about his department having a fourteen day turnaround from the provision of user requirement specifications to having some working program.
There is a lot of research in to Agile programming that has some very encouraging findings. The evidence seems to be that it creates tangible application functionality in a shorter timeframe which encourages user involvement in application design and greater ownership from them when the systems are finally delivered. However, its success is very much dependent on the teamwork displayed by the Agile programmers who are creating the code.
This is where the CIO had his challenges. How do you reward the efforts of a team? How do you set KPIs for a team rather than an individual? Typically, performance reviews and metrics in modern organisations are done on an individual basis. In many ways individual responsibility is what modern capitalism is all about. Collective targets are seen as something of an anachronism that belonged in the failed economies that laid behind the former Iron Curtain.
However, modern sport shows that teamwork is a key component in the success of an organisation. Michael Jordan, the famous American basketball player, once remarked that “talent wins matches, teamwork wins championships”. In other words if a sports team is going to succeed it must harness the collective talents of all its members. This is especially the case for a team like Stoke City with limited resources. The only way it can compete with the big boys is to beat them on teamwork.
If the Stoke City Manager Tony Pulis has one key attribute it is the ability to get his players to work as a team. This is much easier said than done in the world of elite sport. Pulis is dealing with players with enormous egos. They are at the very top of their profession. Yet to succeed they must be willing to subjugate their egos for the benefit of the team as a whole. This will entail them being prepared to be dropped if they don’t have the attributes needed to overcome a particular opponent. It requires them to be prepared to keep going when things look too hard. Above all it requires them to help set up others who may end up getting the glory.
One particular teamwork challenge that faces Tony Pulis right now is how to find a role for probably the most skilful player he has in his squad. This player on his day is a match winner. However, he also has a tendency to run hot and cold. If he doesn’t perform in a team like Stoke he places a much greater burden on his colleagues. As such, Pulis has, of late, decided to leave him out. This approach is not particularly popular with the Stoke fans many of whom believe the team is losing the talents of one of their best players. However, Pulis probably feels a more consistent team player is more valuable to him than an erratic talent. He also may hope that his approach encourages the player in question to try and prove him wrong.
The challenges facing Tony Pulis today had a number of surprising similarities with those facing my CIO contact. He too has staff in the IT department who seem to believe they possess skill sets that give them certain privileges. If he panders to them he runs the risk of unsettling those in the department who are not complaining and pulling their weight. However, if he doesn’t pander to these petulant personnel he realises he could well lose key skills that may be difficult to replace. Agile compounds these challenges because it revolves around team collaboration.
The CIO would like to structure incentives and bonuses that recognise the team as a whole. He believes that this will encourage co-operation between his staff that will achieve better business outcomes from the application development groups. Yet he clearly finds that there are few precedents in the business for such an approach. It was clear that he is getting little help from his HR department in this matter.
I write this a few days before an upcoming match between Stoke City and Manchester United, probably the biggest team in English football. Right now there is turbulence in the Manchester United camp. Its star player, Wayne Rooney, has said he feels that his abilities are not being adequately compensated. He wants a transfer to another team. A team that is known as United has to live up to its name otherwise they might find that a solid team of battlers like Stoke City will bring them down. As you can appreciate, I live in hope!
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