people

The People pillar consists of not only team size but skillsets, training, innate abilities and natural coordination. Teams successful in this area, respond to change without interruption, are self-challenging and seek paths for success. These qualities make up the high-performance teams everyone seeks.

Are Your PEOPLE AI Ready?

Here is Sarah's story, an AI consultant, as she navigates a team's transition to AI development...

The management of IT inc. has hired an AI firm to install AI to engineer code. Sarah was hired to lead the effort installing the new AI coding platform.

After a couple weeks meeting the team and watching them work, Sarah noticed a general disengagement across the team members. They do their work, but they do not enjoy their work. In discussing their job, the general consensus was that they fix problems they didn’t create, without the tools they need, for people who get paid far more than they do… Sarah realized the least of her challenges will be installing the AI platform.

Meet the team: The “team” was actually two teams, one specializing in the “backend”, data and APIs, and a “frontend” team working only on the screens and workflow. They had adopted Agile process with daily standup meetings, where Sarah introduced herself.

Observing the meeting, Sarah learned that one of the teams, the “backend” team, consisted of more tenured employees that were very knowledgeable in the data. Only one on the team really engaged in the ongoing conversation, his name was Gary and Sarah calls him the “Institutional Memory Keeper”. Gary knows everything that has been done, every change that has gone wrong and every reason things have been done to date. His team centers around his assessment and direction.

The other team, the “frontend” team, is mainly new hires with less than 5 years experience that are supported by two much more experienced team members. Brett, whom Sarah calls an “Enthusiastic Industry Adopter”, always pushing the team into the latest industry trends with no regard for their feedback. And Sam, the “The Quiet Practitioner”, who doesn’t talk much, but when he does it is insightful, accurate and effective.

Lastly, and not in the standup meeting, was Brenda the product/business analyst, and Cheryl, the project manager. Sarah had met them previously in the AI platform demonstrations. Brenda is a newer hire, college graduate, with a knack for intercepting issues and suggesting outside the box ideas for resolving. Cheryl is a tenured employee and has worked for the company over 20 years. She is a stickler for details, has high trust with business sponsors and stresses over milestones while also remaining rigid on requirements.

Overall, the teams selected for the initial application of Sarah’s AI platform have high aptitude and good synergy. However, she knows the culture’s underlying influence deterring change and comfort in the status quo will be her biggest challenge.

To understand this culture, we need to ask - How do they get their work done? She begins to look into the team’s PROCESS.