Hello everyone, my name is Andrii Girin, and I am an agile coach at RTLabs. Ten years ago I was a project manager with a small team, and now I’m helping others build teams.

Recently, I was with a star map workshop at a professional conference for team leaders Saint TeamLead Confwhich my colleague Kateryna recently wrote about in the post.

This short article is about how and why this idea came about in the first place.

Someone great said that everyone is equally happy, but everyone is unhappy in their own way. Almost the same rule applies in management: everyone has the same obstacles when moving towards a goal, but the consequences are completely different.

Problems often arise for the following reasons:

• one employee resigned and the task was suspended

• another team member is overwhelmed with work

• the third faced difficulties and did not know who to turn to for help. He is in a stupor, work has stopped.

After all, there are vacations, illnesses, and much more, which can also have an extremely negative impact on the overall effectiveness of the project.

We decided to analyze the main problems faced by teams and find some common solution to help people manage teams. In principle, it is obvious. Success primarily depends on:

• normal planning

• a cohesive professional team that can reassemble in case of problems.

Roughly speaking: if your team is structured in such a way that in the event of any of the above example situations, such as firing an employee or adding new tasks, it can quickly reorganize, make a plan for its work and stick to it, it is good. If this does not happen, then you need to change something.

What is really important in this situation is the area of ​​responsibility of the team leader – team leader, scrum master, operations manager, etc. And one of these areas, one of the objects of management is a team, as a production unit.

The effectiveness and sustainability of team work can be evaluated in various ways. One of them is bus factor or bus factor. It shows the number of team members, after the loss of which the work cannot be continued. In my interpretation it means “how many team members can co-found a unicorn startup and fully commit to its development before you, as the team leader, get embarrassed“.

In my sincere belief, work on increasing the bus factor is a hygienic minimum, which can be used to understand whether you have a good manager or not.

When searching for team design tools, you will definitely come across star map.

A Star Map is a tool that allows the team to identify and describe the key skills and competencies required for successful product implementation.

We at RTLabs, in parallel with other initiatives, carefully studied this simple but powerful tool. But how to implement it? Just talking about the star map, of course, is not enough. It was necessary to give our leaders the skill of creating a map, its further analysis and how to apply the obtained results in real life. This is how the first version of the online workshop was developed, during which the participants:

• received from me the minimal set of knowledge required for the initial filling of the star map

• split into virtual teams

• chose a production role and a character

• learned to form a star map

• learned to determine areas of team growth and ways to close them (after all, it’s more interesting!)

• with new knowledge they trained again

• received a facilitation plan (process improvement) and star map formation templates in their team

First pancake the workshop turned out to be a bit of a mess: a quarter of those who completed the training rated it 3 out of 5. However, we received a lot of feedback that allowed us to improve the clarity of the workshop.

We made a few more runs. As a result, our students stopped getting confused in the miro slides, and the logic of the workshop became clear and understandable. After that I decided that It is allowed to conduct experiments not only on one’s colleagues members from other companies can also see it. This is how the idea of ​​presenting a workshop at Saint Team Lead Conf`23 was born. We changed it from an online format to an offline one, colleagues from communications management helped us design colorful character cards, the organizers printed a handout, I bought star stickers in the online store (the card is a star 😂). Many thanks to everyone involved, the preparation was at a high level.

Official evaluation and feedback turned out to be quite high. In the following few days after the workshop, I received several messages from participants thanking me in private.

Well, I hope the workshop helped its participants build their Star Team. And if you also want to take part in it, you have two ways: