High Performance Teams: The Space Shuttle Workshop

This workshop provides a powerful orientation to high performance. You’ll explore the concept of commitment-based management. You’ll learn why control-oriented management models do not work in many situations. You’ll see why the change to open communication and teamwork can make everyone more successful in today's competitive business environment. Employing a fun, highly interactive business simulation, the workshop makes a compelling case for creating a team-based work structure.

Part One:

You’ll form a company, which is organized in a traditional way. Participants are given various job descriptions, and will work as a “real” business would to deliver a space shuttle greeting card to your customers. After doing business for one fiscal year, you’ll review your productivity, quality, and profitability results.

Part Two:

The group is divided into teams, which design their own work to produce the same product. As you might expect, the results and experiences are quite different. Frustration, stress, and confusion abound in part one, while genuine understanding leads to flexibility and success in part two. These are impressive results to be discussed and shared. The only things that changed were work design and information flow–not how hard people tried or how much they cared.

Learning Objectives:

• Understand why today's rapidly changing competitive environment requires all employees to operate as business partners in their organizations.
• Describe from experience the pitfalls of the control management paradigm, and learn to build highly effective, commitment-based teams while participating in a simulation, the “Space Shuttle Shop”.
• Understand how their roles change as a commitment-based culture unfolds in their organizations.

Instructor:

Scott Stribrny brings nearly 40-years of experience in software, systems, and management to his client engagements and his Loyola Executive Education courses. An internationally acknowledged authority in project management, information systems/technology, systems engineering, and lean development and management, Scott is revolutionizing the intersections of business, technology, and organizational risks.

Beginning a corporate career with a start-up firm that went from zero to 100 million dollars in just five years, Scott moved on to a Fortune 50 conglomerate where he worked with industry leading engineers, scientists, and the executive suite. As a leader, Scott was responsible for the development of groundbreaking products and services where he applied best practices in project management. His accumulated management experience ranges across many industries, including aerospace, telecommunications, finance, insurance, retail, information services, and manufacturing.

Scott is President, co-founder, and managing director of Group Atlantic, Inc.; a senior consultant in the business technologies strategies practice for IT research company the Cutter Consortium; and a thought leader at the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute. He is widely published on the subjects of risk management and project/program management and is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences and company events. He teaches courses on leadership development, agile, high-performance teams, requirements definition, risk management, and project estimating, always providing practical, applicable (or actionable) knowledge and content and an innovative, refreshing, and engaging delivery.