Five top tips to build transformation teams

Over the last few months, our team has been expanding, focusing on creating solutions through collaboration. As a communicator, I’ve always believed in the power of working with technical experts to address challenges. Here’s an example that highlights this approach.

A need arose to conduct user research interviews “in private” while allowing clients to observe and understand user struggles with a service. This presented an exciting challenge.

Live streaming, which aims for a broad audience reach, wasn’t the right fit. We needed a secure solution for a small group.

Discussing this with a teammate, we explored past solutions for broadcasting live streams.  They quickly leveraged their knowledge of coding, servers, and other technical aspects to develop an in-house video service.  This service works with Zoom to receive a meeting’s video stream using the RTMP feature.

Building software is their speciality. Together, we configured a private client area on our website and installed a custom video player. This allowed clients to observe user interviews conducted by our researcher securely, providing valuable insights for service improvement.

So, I guess the point of my saying this is just to give five tips that I’ve reflected on over the last week:

1. Take time to develop your team or company – the better you work together on your projects, the better you’ll work together on client or stakeholder projects.

2. Develop your relationship with your tech teams. Tech teams want to deliver stuff that works, though in my experience, they aren’t always able to get close enough to ‘user need’ to do that alone. Communications can often be the bridge between the tech teams and the user, and by brokering that conversation, great things can happen.

3. Change the culture from ‘perfection out of the box’ to starting with something that just works. It may be a bit clunky at first, and it may not work on every browser at first (yes, we had that too), but progress builds confidence and momentum to make things better. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder) said, “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late,” which has always stuck in my mind.

4. Shout about what you’re doing and don’t only “share success” – This is where comms people can help tell the story of how tech people develop solutions. Share the ‘why’ – what’s the need, what are the alternatives, how do we involve others? Share when things go wrong; people love a bit of drama! – It makes your work more exciting and inspires others to do the same.

5. Recognise that building something small quickly can be the spark for bigger and better ideas, and that’s where it gets really exciting. We’re already looking at how we can use what we’ve built to work toward creating a better experience for our training courses for clients, where we could provide a private place on our site for course materials, recordings of the sessions and other materials to help them get the most out of our sessions.

If you have an idea you’d like our help with, please get in touch. We love doing this stuff.