The practice team has the following characteristics:
1. Team members come from all over the world and share the same team consciousness.
2. Members are responsible for knowledge management in a certain field. Such as: managing intellectual capital, formulating knowledge management rules, etc. Among them, intellectual capital management includes: collecting, evaluating, sorting out and disseminating the knowledge enjoyed by the team, and observing and studying the development and changes of these knowledge.
3. The funds for the survival and development of the team come from the sponsorship of enterprises.
4. The practice team is neither a formal unit nor a formal organization.
The content of practice team involves many fields of the enterprise. For example, in cultivating IBM's core competence, it involves enterprise system management, new technology experiment, product development, organizational change and so on. In terms of market development ability, it involves e-commerce and product packaging design. In terms of industry category distribution, it involves automobile, petrochemical, logistics, finance and insurance, medical care and so on. It can be seen that the evolution of practice team plays an important role in the transformation of corporate culture.
Five stages of practice team development
The evolution of practice team can be divided into five stages: incubation period, construction period, busy period, active period and adaptation period. In different stages, the practice team shows its own characteristics, and the latter stage covers the functions of the previous stage.
The core of the incubation period group has appeared and the team is about to be formed. The core is composed of a few individuals who have something in common in their work or interests, but people have not fully discovered this * * * and how to use it.
Contact is the basic feature of this stage. Everyone in the core should define each other's position, communicate and establish contact, and actively promote the birth of the team.
Construction cycle. The team began to form its own characteristics. At first, several core personnel began to plan the future from the perspective of the whole team, formulate development plans, establish the way of team existence, start to build the basic structure of the team, and formulate the team operation process and members' work rules.
It is the basic function of the construction period to create a cultural environment in which * * * enjoys and form a "memory" of * * *. In the process of active creation, the core members of the team gradually come into contact with * * * knowledge, which the team stores as a basic "memory" and uses as a standard for recruiting new members.
Busy period. The structure and process designed in the previous stage began to operate, and the whole team acted according to the established goals. Each member continues to play his role steadily, and the scale and complexity of the team continue to expand. The mutual acceptance of team members and team learning are the main characteristics of this stage.
Active period. The team began to evaluate the value of the previous work, and then established contacts with other groups to continuously expand their influence.
Multi-faceted cooperation is the basic feature of this stage. Members strive to keep in touch, actively expand the knowledge enjoyed by * * *, unite and cooperate with the outside world, and strive to promote the value of the team to a larger organization.
Adaptation period. The team entered a new height and began to pay attention to the changes in the external environment and make positive responses. In order to gain competitive advantage, the team constantly adjusts itself, innovates knowledge, and establishes new structures and processes, thus forming a new environment.
Change and evolution are the basic characteristics of this stage. Through continuous reform, the team has achieved fruitful results in new products, new methods, new processes and new organizations. These new achievements not only affect team members and the internal environment of the team, but also affect other departments and organizations outside the team.
Changes of three elements of practice team in different stages
People, process and technology are the three basic elements of practice team, which support and interact with each other and change with different stages of team evolution.
First stage
People: People need to carry out some simple social activities in order to establish some kind of connection and lay the foundation for the formation of the team. Like who are you? What unit do you work in, etc. And the understanding of these extremely simple problems is to form a kind of * * * knowledge. If they are both members of the future team, they are right about "Who are you?" It must be "you are a bit like me". For the first few members, their reaction is: there are not only some similarities, but also similarities in understanding and judging the value standards of the problem. In a word, everyone has at least one basic similarity in their work. Process: * * * The process of education and development, communication and organizational integration plays an important role in promoting interpersonal communication, and these processes are the basis for people to form a team.
Technology: The technical requirements at this stage are very simple, as long as it is a convenient tool and place for communication. For example, telephone, teleconference, email, chat room, email, forum, bulletin board, etc. All the ways and means that can organize people in different fields of knowledge are useful.
stage Ⅱ
Personnel: In specific work, people gradually deepen their understanding by sharing experiences and exchanging ideas. They gradually established vocabulary with * * * and got an understanding of these words. In this process, individuals begin to look at themselves with the overall value of the team, seek consistency with other members of the team, and to some extent begin to integrate into the psychological process of the team. As a team, a basic question that people need to answer is "Who are we?" Including what our purpose is, what we do, how we should deal with each other, and so on. According to the answers to these basic questions, the identification standard of team identity is formed. According to these standards, members began to create the history of team identity and form the "memory" of team identity. So some stories about the early founders of the team have been handed down.
Process: This stage requires the following processes, which are essential for the core team of the team to plan and implement the future development plan of the team. Specifically, it includes: defining the scope of work of the team and putting forward clear requirements for members; Defining the roles and standards of conduct of members; Identify ways to identify, attract and absorb new members; Find the knowledge of the team, classify it and fix it in an appropriate form; Put forward the idea of sharing unwritten knowledge among members and the scheme of managing written knowledge; Provide necessary technical support for members and realize man-machine compatibility.
Technology: The team needs a special place to store the accumulated written knowledge so that present or future members can refer to it conveniently. This requires an information storage that any member can access. The team can also establish a classified retrieval system, which will be better if it is linked with the classified retrieval systems of other units.
The third stage
Personnel: At this stage, old members are maturing, new members are joining, and team culture is in a complex state of change. In the process of teamwork, members will have a new understanding of the work of the team, form some unwritten knowledge, deepen mutual understanding among members, enhance mutual trust, and make the team an organic whole. New members began to get in touch with old members and get familiar with the history of the team. At this time, the most important thing is to realize the enjoyment of written knowledge and unwritten knowledge by new and old members. The story of the founder must be told repeatedly among the new members, and the connotation of these stories will continue to be enriched. Old members must guide new members and set an example in behavior, so that new members can understand and adapt to the situation of the team as soon as possible and clarify their roles. Equally important, the team has absorbed a lot of knowledge from new members, which makes team members need to further strengthen communication in order to obtain more knowledge they need from others, and then make members form the habit of re-examining team knowledge regularly.
At this time, the enterprise began to be interested in the situation of the team, began to contact with the team members, and guided the team to do a good job in the whole enterprise. Enterprises began to track some activities of the team, perhaps intervening in the activities of the team. There are two typical methods: supporting the development of the team, or redefining the scope, tasks and modes of the team.
Process: In addition to the implementation and normal operation of the process mentioned in the second stage, it is important to collect feedback information and measure the effectiveness of team behavior at this stage. But at this time, the knowledge capital of the management team is more complicated, and the team needs to find the gap between the basic knowledge and fill it. To this end, we must constantly explore new methods, attract new people and socialize team members, so as to maintain the vitality of the team. It is also an important process to encourage team members to exchange work experience face to face and learn unwritten knowledge. In addition, it is also very important to integrate the knowledge management process of the team with other work processes of the enterprise. For example, implement new projects, design business plans, and review the completion of projects.
Technology: This stage mainly needs technical support in computer statistics, sampling survey and statistical analysis; Workflow support is also an important aspect; The ability of network communication and cross-language communication is also indispensable.
The fourth stage
Personnel: Team members are very familiar with each other. They are not only familiar with each other's expertise and the value standard of knowledge exchange within the team, but also have a strong sense of dependence on the knowledge within the team. The typical behavior is that once you are in trouble at work, members think of the team, while for other members of the team, others' work is their own work. In order to work with other members of the team, they overcame many difficulties.
Process: Three powerful processes push the team to actively overcome various problems faced by enterprises. Namely, team building, collective research and decision-making. Teams can constantly adjust many working groups through some highly flexible management programs. When working with other teams, it is also an essential process to integrate the workflow of different teams. During this period, team learning is very important for the whole team and individual members.
Technology: At this stage, both direct and indirect cooperation technologies are very important. Online chat rooms, online meetings, seminars, debates and other analytical tools are all necessary.
The fifth stage
Personnel: Team members are busy with some extremely important work, which directly changes and affects the production and sales of enterprises and constantly innovates their knowledge in their fields. At this time, the influence of team members has greatly exceeded the expectations of sponsors. They broke the limitations of the group itself and began to cooperate with other teams, associations and organizations, creating new businesses, new products and new markets. The speed of team evolution is so fast that the team itself produces new teams. Enterprises give the team a lot of room for development and rely on the team's innovative ability to meet the market demand. Because the work of the team is very important to the development of the enterprise, the enterprise has to directly intervene in the team, and the enterprise is directly responsible for the development of the team. In essence, the team has become a department of the enterprise. At this time, the team did not disappear, but coexisted with the new department or went underground.
Process: At this stage, the team relies on flexible and adaptable procedures to actively adjust its behavior according to external changes. All the processes of the team focus on one thing: innovation. At the same time, the team actively supports the newly established teams and becomes their leading organizations and learning models. At this time, what is most needed is to open an effective channel to spread knowledge to the outside world.
Technology: any technology that promotes team development and adapts to team changes is suitable for this stage. The team began to try new technologies and actively studied other new technologies. In practice, the team often uses its own mature tools to integrate the technologies of other enterprises, such as using the bulletin boards of trade associations to communicate and cooperate with the outside world. These technologies make the team play a better role and effectively improve the technical level of team members.
Through the exploration of the evolution model of the practice team of IBM Global Services Company, we find that sometimes the evolution of the team is not completely progressive according to five stages, sometimes the evolution of the team lingers between two stages, and sometimes the team suddenly jumps from a relatively stable stage to a higher stage, but overall, the evolution of the team has a life cycle including five stages. Moreover, by exploring and analyzing the changes of people, processes and technologies in different development stages, the three elements are integrated, and the basic framework of team knowledge management is formed, which has certain enlightenment significance for any practice team and any organization to change their own culture.
Source: Knowledge Management Center