4.3 Team Success Factors and Ground Rules

Four elements, four artifacts

Treat these as a checklist for the first two weeks. If any artifact does not exist, the team does not have that element regardless of what anyone says.

Management support

Support is a behaviour, not a statement. The observable tests:

• Has the sponsor signed the charter, and does the sponsor's authority cover every function the process crosses?
• Are named resources -- Black Belt hours, SME hours, data access -- written into the charter and agreed by the members' managers?
• Is there a pre-agreed funding band for implementation, so the solution does not queue for a capital cycle after the analysis is complete?
• Does the sponsor attend toll gates, and are the meetings held on schedule?

A sponsor who endorses the project publicly but never attends a toll gate has withdrawn support in the only currency that counts.

Clear goals

A goal is clear when four elements are present:

$\text{Goal} = \text{metric} + \text{baseline} + \text{target} + \text{date}$

Weak: "Improve invoice accuracy." Clear: "Reduce the invoice error rate on first submission from 4.7% (Jan-Jun baseline, 18,400 invoices) to 1.5% by 30 November."

The clear version does three jobs at once: it defines what data must be collected, it defines when the project is finished, and it prevents the argument at closure about whether the goal was met. Goal-setting mechanics are treated fully in the Define chapter under SMART objectives; here the point is that goal clarity is a team success factor, because ambiguity about the target is what produces endless analysis.

Ground rules

Ground rules are the team's own operating agreement. Two properties make them work:

1. Authored by the team. Rules issued to a team are ignored; rules the team wrote are enforced by the team. Spend twenty minutes on this in the kickoff.
2. Enforced by an explicit mechanism. Name who calls a breach and what happens. Usually the facilitator calls it, in the moment, without escalation.

A workable starting set:

• Start and end on time; the meeting ends at the stated time even if the agenda is unfinished.
• One conversation at a time; no side discussions.
• Pre-work is mandatory; a member who has not done it does not vote on that item.
• Data beats opinion; a claim about the process must be accompanied by evidence or logged as a hypothesis to test.
• Disagree in the room, align outside it -- once a decision is recorded, the team speaks with one voice.
• Silence is not consent; the facilitator will ask each member directly before recording a decision.
• Actions have an owner and a due date, or they are not actions.

The two rules that most reliably change team behaviour are "data beats opinion" and "silence is not consent". The first converts arguments into experiments; the second is the antidote to groupthink and to the phenomenon of decisions reversing themselves in the corridor afterwards.

Timelines

A DMAIC project without dates does not finish; it fades. The minimum artifact is a toll-gate schedule:

Two disciplines make the schedule real. Toll gates are decisions, not presentations: the sponsor either approves the phase, sends it back with specific gaps, or kills the project. And the Measure phase gets a hard date, because it is where projects stall -- there is always more data to collect, and the honest question is whether more data would change the decision.

Diagnosing a struggling team