The Leader's Toolkit

Deliverables - Action or Recommendation?

Copyright Lark Ritchie 1995. 1996.

Action or Recommendation?...

As a leader, one of the most important thing you have to work out with your Sponsor is the answer to the question "What is the responsibility of the C.I. Team and what are its expected products?"

Does your Sponsor expect your team to study a process and take appropriate action, or study a process or situation and make a recommendation? A sponsor may want one or the other, or both, depending on the scale and scope of the process and project. These are defined in the project mandate, or mission statement.

In some cases, a team itself, as it changes a process, may have to make recommendations that other indirectly related items require change, be eliminated, or added. These two 'team products' are quite distinct things.

The first team product is an activity or process change that the group has been empowered to make as previously defined in the team mandate or mission and project scope. The second team product is a logical conclusion formed by the team and delivered to the sponsor who them implements the recommendations. Recommendations are usually made when the team does not have the authority to make the recommended change (usually spelled out in the mission or mandate an scope. (For example, a drastic modification to a job description, a change in job classification or compensation, an appeal to a government agency, or when a team feels it should stop or conclude its work before achieving the agreed objectives.) In these cases, the authority and the responsibility to carry out the recommendation may not have been granted to the leader and his group for good reason.

The Sponsor and the Leader need to work this out so that the team product meets the expectations of all parties concerned. Misunderstandings at this very early stage of a project lead to team confusion, wasted time debating the mandate, and the eventual unexpected reactions when a team takes action to change the process, or falls short of action by concluding the team work at a recommendation or report.

Copyright, Lark Ritchie, 1994.

© 1996 Lark Ritchie. Contact me at this address..