Who's on Your Team?

English: Lima Lima Flight team performing at Thunder over Louisville. Thunder opens a two week celebration which ends with the Kentucky Derby, on the first Saturday in May. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Friend of the Blog, Team Clock, issued an interesting challenge at Team Clock. Go ahead. Read it. I'll wait here.

Done? Cool.

OK, here's my take.

What Team Clock proposes in this exercise is exactly, I mean exactly the same exercise I did when I was writing several versions of a news story. Back in the day.

I told beginning reporters to grab a piece of paper and put the slug (title) in the center of the paper inside a circle. If the story was a win/lose I told the reporter to put all the winners on one side of the paper and all the losers on the other. Neutrals go underneath.

For a preview or non-confrontation (yes, I wrote a lot of non-confrontational stories back when News was News and listeners weren't thumping their chests) I told the reporter to just write down all the roles, titles, organizations and sorts of people directly and indirectly affected by a story (notice that Fox News and the Chicago Tribune?  the difference between affect and effect as a verb?).

When the simple exercise  was complete, I looked directly into the cub reporter's eyes and said, and I'm quoting here, "Now you have absolutely no excuse - you should be able to come up with at least six leads for each story, all you need to do is write the first sentence from the perspective of one of your circles."

I do this today when I'm researching or planning a project. Knowing the players, the relationships (well, at least the outward relationships) and the org. chart are big helps when writing Risk and Risk Mitigation Plans, emailing lists (the execs get the red-yellow-green light summaries, the managers get the executive summary and the team members all get access to the full report (it's on the wiki)  It helps manage expectations (the sales department wants an all purple and red motif to generate interest, marketing wants the company colors [Black and White], program management wants to be able to re-skin it to any color they want- backgrounds, text, font, everything and the department manager and project manager want it all- within the deadline and under budget.

Competing and dynamic interests that all need to be addressed and satisfied.

Then you know who's on your team.
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