Cross Functional Teams And Scheduling Team

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

You may want to establish certain administrative roles that simply help your team manage its business better. You can give these roles any name that you like, and you certainly add others as needed. The key, however, is discussing these needs upfront with the team and settling on who will handle them.

Table Content

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1.0 Introduction

Conflict can be pretty much inevitable when working with other peoples. Different people and different viewpoints and under the right set of circumstances, those differences escalate to conflict. How to handle the conflict determines whether it works to the team advantage or contributes to its demise. It is clear that conflict has to be dealt with, but the question is how, conflict has to be dealt with constructively, with a plan, or direct, clarify what is going on, and attempt to reach a resolution through common techniques like negotiation or compromise. Otherwise conflict will get to pulled into the argument and create an even larger mess. Although that, sometimes conflict isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Healthy and constructive conflict is a component of high functioning teams. Conflict arises from differences between people can make the diverse teams more effective that those made up of people with similar experience. When people with varying viewpoints, experiences, skills, and opinions are tasked with a project or challenge, the combined effort can far surpass what any group of similar individual could achieve. And of course, team member must be open to these differences and not let them rise into full-blown disputes. Understanding and appreciating the various viewpoints involved in conflict and the constructive difference of opinion, and avoid negative conflict that is destructive and disruptive are the key factors in its resolution that must be developed by the team members. To getting to, and maintaining a healthy balance, that balance are requires a well-developed team skills, particularly the ability to resolve the conflict when it does happens, and the ability to keep it healthy and avoid conflict in the day to day course of team working. When there is conflict on my team within my organization, Dell, there are few ways to settle the conflict in my team.

2.0 Body

2.1 Three step to settle conflict. Step one, Prepare for Resolution

When there is a conflict in the team where is a major crisis in dell, the team are always involves on emotions, perceptions, and actions where the team will experience and need to address on all three levels to resolve the conflicts. The team must replace the negative with the positive ones. There are three stage processes in dell which can help the team to settle conflict on their own. The first step is Prepare for Resolution. In prepare for resolution, there are four main areas to be discuss which is acknowledge the conflict, discuss the impact, agree to cooperative process and agree to communicate. To acknowledge the conflict, the team must acknowledge the conflict before conflict can be managed and resolved. The tendency is for people to ignore the first sign of conflict, perhaps as it seems trivial, or is difficult to differentiate from the normal, healthy debate the teams can thrive on. Once the team recognizes the issue, the process of resolution can start to process. And to discuss the impact, the conflict is having on the team dynamics and performance. To agree to a cooperative process, there must be putting the team together first, and setting aside the team opinion or ideas for the time being. If anyone in the team wants to win more than he or she wants to resolve the conflict, then the team will find themselves at a stalemate. And also, the most important thing throughout the resolution process is for everyone to keep communications open to make sure everyone in the team are agree to communicate. The team need to talk about the issue and discuss the problem active listening is essential to get understand where other person feelings.

2.2 Step two, understand the situation

In the step 2, once the team is ready to settle the conflict, the next thing to do is to understand the situation, and point of view from the team member to make sure that each person position is heard and understood team member strong emotions so everyone can get through the emotion and reveal out the true nature of the conflict. There are four ways to understand the situation. First, clarify positions, whatever the conflict or disagreement between the team members, the most important is clarify people positions whether there are obvious factions within the team who support a particular option, approach or idea, or each team member holds the own unique view, each of the team member position are need to clearly identified which this can help the teams see the facts more objectively and with less emotion. The second way to understand the situation is list the facts, assumptions and beliefs underlying each position. Team member have to realize what other team member believe, what information are using by each of them as a basis for the beliefs and also what decision making criteria and processes have employed in the team. The third way to understand the situation is analyze in smaller groups. If the teams are large, break the team into smaller groups and separating team member who are in alliance. In these smaller groups, analyze and dissect each member, and the associated facts, assumptions and beliefs by discussing and find out which facts and assumptions are true and which are the important to the outcome. With this way, the group members will gain a better understanding between team members, also can reveal new areas of agreement, and new ideas and solutions that make the best of each members and perspective. This is important to take care to remain open, rather than criticize or judge the perceptions and assumptions of other people and listen to all solutions and ideas presented by the various sides of the conflict. Each member needs to feel heard and acknowledged if a workable solution is to be reached. The last way to understand the situation is convene back as a team. After the group dialogue, each team member is likely to reaching agreement. The process of uncovering facts and assumptions allows people to step away from the emotional attachments and see the issue more objectively.

Step three, reach agreement

After the step one and step two are done, now that all team member are understand other team member feelings, the team will decide what decision or course of action to take. With the facts and assumptions considered, this is easier to see the best of action and reach agreement. If further analysis and evaluation is required, there is must an agreement needed in what needs to be done by who and whom, planning to reach agreement within a particular timescale and define which decision making and evaluation tools are to be employed. When the conflict is resolved, the team must acknowledge the contributions on everyone made toward reaching a solution. This can build team cohesion and confidence in the problem solving skills, and can help avert further conflict.

3.0 Recommendation

In my opinion, to handle team conflict which is major crisis in the organization, teams need to develop ways to preventing conflict from becoming damaging. Team members can learn skills and behavior avoid conflict as possible. Team members can learn how to dealing with conflict immediately when there are conflict happen to avoid the temptation to ignore the conflict. Besides, team members have to being open minded, if there are people having issues, each people need to be expressed immediately and not to allowed to fester. Each team member have to encouraging different points of view to avoid conflict happen as team member can insist on hones dialogue and expressing the feelings and also no blaming other team members which will deeper the conflict.

4.0 Conclusion

Conflicts are inevitable in any organization, because of this, a modest level of conflict can be useful in generating better ideas and methods, inspiring concern and ingenuity, and stimulating emergence long suppressed problems. By respecting differences between peoples, being able to able to resolve conflict when does happen and also working to prevent it to maintain a healthy and creative team atmosphere by accepting ideas, beliefs, and assumptions. When the team is learn to see issues from other side, there will lead up the new ways of thinking and bring in the new and innovative solutions, and healthy team performance.

5.0 Bibliography

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_79.htm

http://www.appliedsportpsych.org/resource-center/coaches/articles/conflict

http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/resolving-conflicts-quickly-and-peacefully/

http://www.wittcom.com/how_to_resolve_conflict.htm

Question 2

Introduction

Administrative roles are important for every team to help the team manage its business better. Administrative employees are the backbone of most corporate businesses, performing the types of tasks necessary for companies to function and support their organization with a wide variety of services to free management of administrative detail. Typical administrative duties include scheduling meetings, making travel arrangements, handling written, telephone and electronic communications, maintaining records and creating and distributing reports. Employees who handle administrative tasks in small companies can be just as important as those in corporate businesses. Having an administrative team in small business can free up to focus on tasks directly related to growing the company rather than being bogged down by administrative details. Furthermore, administrative professionals have varying levels of responsibility in large organization, and senior administrative positions may recruit and supervise clerical staff, manage projects and coordinate major events such as annual stockholder meetings. Most administrative professionals work in a team environment to make sure all the project and works can successfully finish. There are some administrative roles to help the team manage the business better.

Body

Administrative roles- project team, handling phone calls and mailings administrative team

The first administrative roles that can be designed for the team to help in manage business are project teams. Project teams are assigned to work on well defined projects with budget, schedules and specific end dates. A team can be divided into sub-teams which are only used for a period of time according to the business or project need to perform activities that contribute toward achieving a common task related goal. The sub-teams will be disbanded after the project is deemed complete. Mostly the objectives for administrative project teams are such as updating customer service call center, sourcing and purchasing ergonomic chairs for the programming department, investigating a customer complaint trend and any related problems. These projects will be assigned by managers, executives or administrative services management. Furthermore, there will be a handling phone calls and mailings administrative team to handle both inbound and outbound phone calls and all mail correspondence. There will be a receptionist in the team to answer all the incoming calls, knowing who is the correct person in the organization to receive the call and the route the call accordingly. Also, there will be an administrative assistant to call the clients on behalf of team manager to check up on the clients satisfaction about the purchases. Besides that, there will be a sub-team call clerical team that responsible for drafting letters, printing and handling mailing or working directly with representatives from service providers such as DHL and FedEx.

Administrative roles- Virtual Teams and data entry team

The second administrative roles that can be designed for the team to help in manage business are virtual teams. Virtual teams will be creating by made up of professionals in different location who meet and work electronically through email, teleconferencing and videoconferencing. The reason virtual team create is because this will allowed employees to meet each other in different times and space around the world. This can allowed team member to work by different shifts and team member may not be practical to always travel to meet face-to-face. Virtual teams are a cost-effective way to harness the expertise of scattered professionals which will cost more to bring the team physically together than the value project. Sometimes a virtual team often can produce the same results with less expense than other teams. Furthermore, the data entry administrative team will be created to inputting information from a printed page into a computer database or manually entering data from one software application into another. This will be easy for the team who work with the invoice like accounting employee by letting the data entry team manually enter all the invoice information into system. Marketing employee, as another example, may enter quantitative customer data from multiple retail outlets report into a separate database.

Administrative roles- Committees and Task Force teams and New project administrative team

The third administrative roles that can be designed for the team to help in manage business are Committees and task forces team and new project administrative team. In Committees and task forces team, the teams are assigned to address a specific objective like project team but committees and task forces team are more focused on researching and analyzing a problem to make recommendations for the best course of action. Mostly, the committees are work on the tasks that require ongoing attention like continuous improvement or safety, and the reason task forces are formed to address specific concerns like product bug, a recall or a workplace problem. Besides that, the new project administrative team can have a reputation as being repetitive but often feature wide-ranging responsibilities that introduce a new challenge on a continuing basis. The new project team will be more on doing searching and finding the new project to the organization. Mostly, the searching for the new tasks are within a month, and the team member will assists the company managers to virtually all major projects.

Administrative roles- Cross-functional teams and scheduling team

The last administrative roles that can be designed for the team to help in manage business are cross-functional teams. Cross functional teams will be formed with a group of team member from the team whose expertise is required for a specific objective. The team members are borrowed from the respective work areas to go together for a goal like how to develop a better work process for a new product or service line or creating a marketing video for new accounts. Time and attention of team member is split during the workday with the everyday job function and team activities. Besides, the scheduling team are responsible on handle all the scheduling activities for the supervisors and top management. The schedule administrative team will be handle flight and hotel bookings, client meetings, dinner and seminar reservations, transportation and virtually any scheduling and related task that would take away from supervisor productivity. Furthermore, the scheduling team are responsible to schedule the daily work activities for the supervisor they belongs to, this is very important because once there is any mistake in scheduling, there will brings an issues and problem to the supervisor and organization.

Recommendation

In my opinion, by establish certain administrative team, it is clear that it will bring a lot of advantages to the team and organization, but there is a need of establish more team and more functional to run the organization, and also, to manage the team better on their business. By establish more administrative team, the team can separate to more team according to the need of skill by each team, this can show the quality and technique of each team member, and this also can keep the team work together to done the project and to solve every issues that they will face in the future.

Conclusion

Administrative roles are very important for every team and the organization to manage the business better by avoid any mistake and issues. By having the administrative team and roles can free the organization up to focus on tasks directly related to growing the organization, rather than being bogged down by administrative details.