A team strategy is a plan that outlines how a team will achieve its goals. Developing and implementing a strategy is a fundamental part of team management. Team strategies may be developed as part of an annual budget and planning process, and can be updated regularly to respond to changes. Overall, a team strategy is a plan that outlines the steps a team will take to achieve its goals. The following are illustrative examples of a team strategy.
Revenue
Plans to achieve revenue goals. These are tangible steps that bring revenue closer and need not be directly revenue generating. Generate 1000 qualified leads.
Cost Control
Plans to reduce overhead or unit costs. Reduce team office space by moving to a system of booking workspaces to replace permanent desks for team members who regularly work from home.
Customer Experience
Improving things for customers in some way. Test easy to open packaging to identify variants that will improve the customer experience.
Projects
One time initiatives. Implement a system to book office workspaces and resources such as meeting rooms.
Programs
Ongoing strategies that may involve many projects, activities and tasks that evolve over time. Identify and evaluate 50 possible locations for the satellite office program.
Requirements
A common way to achieve goals is to develop requirements and sponsor a project. Deliver requirements for the marketing automation system.
Communication
Ongoing, repeated or one time communications. Contribute to weekly governance board meetings and champion information security standards, practices and initiatives. Goal: achieve acceptance of our initiatives at the board level.
Decision Making
A plan to make a decision or improve a decision making process. Develop business plans with return on investment estimates for all project proposals.
Internal Controls
Plans to implement internal controls. Develop an approval process, schedule and tracker for working from home.
Knowledge Management
Developing, capturing, preserving, controlling and communicating potentially valuable information. Present a lunch and learn session that communicates our services to the entire firm.
Stakeholder Management
Selling your value as a team and influencing your stakeholders. Create a dashboard that communicates service request throughput by business unit.
Business Processes
Measuring business processes, improving them and measuring again in repeated cycles of improvement and optimization. As a strategy, this often doesn’t mention specifically what will be done. Restructure the order fulfillment process at the Dallas fulfillment center to increase the total throughput of the facility to 1 million orders a day.
Automation
Automating toil. Develop an automatic payback calculation that pre-approves sales proposals under $250,000 if they meet standard profitability criteria.
Risk Management
The process of identifying, treating and controlling risk. Identify and manage information security risks related to work from home processes.
Service Delivery
Improvements to the delivery of a service. This includes services to internal stakeholders. Automate fulfillment of common desktop requests such as setting users up for the sales system.
Work Quality
Increasing the quality of your deliverables. Improve the quality of site inspection reports by designing a new report template that addresses stakeholder needs.
Compliance
Complying with laws, regulations, industry and internal standards. Implement multi-factor authentication process for all team members accessing the network over VPN from remote locations.
Recruiting
Recruiting and related strategies such as onboarding. Conduct lunch and learn sessions to pitch job openings to internal candidates.
Team Culture
Team culture are the intangible elements of your work such as norms and expectations. Develop a culture of in-depth preparation for sales meetings by regularly evaluating account reps for the depth of their client and product knowledge and overall professionalism.
