AMIRHAMID.COM
UNLOCKING THE MYSTERY OF TEAM
EXCELLENCE BY CREATING A GENIUS CODE
by Amir Hamid
When the job of igniting an otherwise lackluster work improvement
programme fell into my lap, I was skeptical to say the least.
A
fter all, the university I
worked for employed
over ten thousand
people, of diverse
professions and nationalities. The
job of rallying a large, continuous
pool of projects from such a wide
swathe of personalities seemed,
at first blush, impossible.
Before setting off on my own
tangent, I knew I had to make
several key decisions, and quickly.
The decision factory is the new
marketplace of ideas. My role was
not to produce a tangible product
but a programme that would
create an environment conducive
to teams and projects, as well as
muster the enthusiasm for teams
to take their projects further, into
competitions and conferences.
In those early days, teams were
primarily from the Information
Technology groups, and projects
were almost always incremental
tweaks to existing systems,
infrastructure or applications.
This was hardly surprising, since
most projects inevitably involved
automation of some sort.
Where were projects from
administration, though? Didn’t
human resource specialists
have any bright ideas on how
1
It’s imperative to understand how knowledge is developed when building services or
programmes from scratch
to improve talent development?
Didn’t safety officers have a better
method to conduct site safety
audits?
UNRAVELING THE MYSTERY
In the life cycle of knowledge
development, my task was a
mystery; its boundaries tenuous,
its possibilities hidden. Yet, I was
into a solid set of instructions. The
experience, skills and expertise
that my supervisor possessed
remained, in effect, a heuristic.
I thus began my apprenticeship
with my supervisor, following
him on his assessment sessions,
networking with the people
he networked with, and taking
copious notes on the style and
The National University of Singapore (NUS) is made up of
about 16 academic schools and 20 administrative offices,
spread across 3 sprawling campuses.
not exactly starting from zero
base. My supervisor was an expert
in quality management, and had
tons of experience assessing
teams and projects from a wide
array of industries. In Singapore,
productivity projects are assessed
by judges who are versed in the
National Innovation and Quality
Circles (IQC) Assessment Guide.
Unfortunately, the precious body
of knowledge was not condensed
manner in which he engaged
teams.
Several months later, I had
gathered enough knowledge
to begin establishing the
programme’s main ideas. The
bulk of my supervisor’s intangible
heuristic had been passed to me
through intensive consultation
and on-the-job training. Selfresearch into coaching and
facilitation methods, as well
AMIRHAMID.COM
The biggest mistake organisations can make is to ignore the importance of team dynamics and their growth
as project management best
practices, helped me connect
between disparate parts of
the heuristic. I developed the
programme’s business case,
its value proposition, and
communications plan. The Team
Acceleration Roadmap (TAR) was
thus born.
In Singapore, universities are
commonly referred to as Institutes
of Higher Learning. I deliberately
twisted the words and called the
national platform the Learning
Institutions Quality Conference
(LIQC), therefore emphasising
the continuous nature of genuine
learning.
OPERATIONALISING KNOWLEDGE
Once teams secured good
recognition at LIQC, they would
then progress to the third and
final checkpoint, which was the
international platform.
The roadmap was deceptively
simple. It consists of only three
checkpoints. The first checkpoint
was the University. This was the
business environment in which
all teams were expected to
do their projects in. To ensure
that projects met the minimum
requirements of the roadmap,
teams submitted their project
abstracts into an online system
for evaluation.
Where projects were found to be
innovative, saved time and cost,
and mitigated real problems, they
were then selected to enter the
next checkpoint, which was the
national platform.
2
My first challenge was the sheer
variety of project methodologies
that teams used. Technologists
generally favoured the waterfall
model. Some championed Lean
Six Sigma, while others stuck to the
classic PDCA formula.
I had to adopt an agnostic approach,
willing to accept these projects into
LIQC as long as the team accepted
the need to re-cast their project
report and presentation according
to a unified and nationallyaccredited IQC Assessment Guide.
It was important to keep TAR
linear so that teams would
be able to demonstrate
and celebrate incremental
achievements. One of the
biggest reasons programmes
fail, according to Kotter, is that
managers do not systematically
plan for, and create, short-term
wins. The linearity also made it
easy for TAR to be explained to
peers and bosses.
SUSTAINING KNOWLEDGE
From the outset, I realised that
teams focused on the wrong
priorities. They obsessed over
the look, feel and language
of their project reports and
presentations, paying little
heed to team dynamics, and
the team’s shared growth.
The crafting of reports and
presentations became a chore,
often delegated to a junior
member. This destroyed the
sense of joint ownership that
team members were supposed
to have for their projects.
Because project reporting was
not seen as a natural activity,
AMIRHAMID.COM
could easily replicate it in future
projects. More importantly, I took
special effort to engage them
as professionals, agreeing with
Douglas McGregor’s Theory Y
that people want to find meaning
in their work and will contribute
in positive ways if the work is well
designed.
Roger L Martin describes the three essential stages of knowledge development in his
book The Design for Business.
teams lost the opportunity to
secure important lessons. Once
the project was completed and
the reports and presentations
submitted for competition, it was
often hard to bring these teams
back in the following year. They
were one-hit wonders.
behaviour is a hard process, and
you can never force people to
change. You can, however, help
them want to.
Almost all the teams that were
invited to the inaugural TAR
were first-timers, with practically
In the first year of LIQC, only 50% of teams won the coveted
Gold. By the third year, the rate had gone up to 100%.
I put a stop this. To control the bad
habits from spreading, I dropped
teams whom I thought were
unwilling to work on their reports
and presentations as a group.
I believed that organisations
cannot change their culture
unless individual employees
change their behaviour. Change
programmes excel at deploying
strategies, technologies, and
training. Sadly, that is never
enough.
To change entrenched behaviour,
I would have to get right down to
the ground and use incentives,
celebration, peer pressure,
coaching to adopt new habits and
role models.
I knew there would be a fallout in
the first year of the TAR. Changing
3
no experience in project
management. I saw this as a rare
opportunity to begin coaching
the teams in the IQC Assessment
Guide, which was really a set
of project management best
practices closely modeled
after Lean Six Sigma’s DMAIC
methodology. I did not try to
ram the best practices down the
teams’ throats, but began instead
from their own projects, and how
these projects would benefit
from a project management
framework. I demonstrated tools
like SIPOC, Cause-and-effect
diagram, process mapping and
the Pareto principle by leveraging
the information they already had
in their project. I paved the way
for teams to internalise these
best practices. Because teams
now had their own projects as
models of best practices, they
Even so, half the teams that joined
the first LIQC did not win a Gold
award. I was not disheartened.
The teams remained in high
spirits. Upon returning to their
offices, they instantly started their
next big project. Some, however,
did the unexpected. They began
to invite new members to their
teams and mentored them the
same way I had mentored them.
Low winnings aside, this was the
precise moment I knew I was on
to something.
CODIFYING KNOWLEDGE
The first teams- what I termed the
First Class- had left behind a suite
of best-practice project reports
and presentations. This was a
body of knowledge that was too
precious to leave lying around.
I built a document repository
and placed all the projects into
it. These documented projects
were then re-shared amongst new
teams.
Knowledge that had begun
life as a mere heuristic in my
supervisor’s mind was now
codified. It had moved from
being a mystery, to a heuristic
and finally to an algorithm -a kind
of collective genius code- whose
success would not only be easily
repeated, but expanded by all
future teams.