Your team is overwhelmed by high-impact system upgrades. How do you keep them motivated and focused?

One way to keep your team motivated and focused during critical upgrades is to regularly communicate with them about the progress and the importance of the upgrades. Providing clear goals and expectations can help team members stay on track and understand the significance of their work. Additionally, offering support and encouragement, recognizing their efforts, and celebrating small wins along the way can boost morale and keep motivation high. It's also essential to create a positive work environment where team members feel valued, heard, and empowered to contribute their ideas and feedback. By fostering a sense of teamwork and collaboration, you can help your team navigate through challenging projects with resilience and determination.

Setting clear expectations is crucial for keeping teams motivated and focused during high-impact system upgrades. Clearly define the goals, scope, and timeline of the upgrades from the outset, ensuring everyone understands their role and responsibilities. This clarity helps team members prioritize tasks effectively and stay aligned with the project's objectives. Regularly communicate updates and milestones, providing transparency about progress and any adjustments to expectations. By setting realistic expectations and maintaining open communication channels, teams feel more empowered and motivated to navigate through challenges, knowing their efforts contribute directly to achieving successful outcomes.

In our line of work, the high impact issues focus the team. If all share, work together, it can be like a well oiled machine. helping each other to delegate tasks, own tasks, keep clear comms between eachother on who is doing what works well.

All good tips, here are some other considerations: consider your stakeholders and clearly communicate the upgrade window to them, make sure you engage with any required teams (including vendor support, if applicable) so your team has the support they need to be successful during the upgrade, TEST in a lower environment first (please, for the love of all, test first... ), ensure you have a clear escalation path defined before the upgrade (hitting a wall and not knowing who to call to get over it is a horrible feeling), give your install window a good buffer to be able to absorb any bumps that happen (they will happen), and make sure you've got a test plan for post-deployment before you call it good.

Could you give the team A free bag of chicken bites and dipping sauce for lunch? The way to an employee’s dedication is through the stomach. You get one hungry teammate and they will drag the other teammate down to the ground.

Training comes in two flavors - backend training and user training. Consider both when you're planning out the upgrade. Utilize that development/QA region (refer to my comments above on testing the deployment out first - here's where that gets to payoff in another way) as a "hands on" region for training.

Early planning, communication and reasonable lead time helps squads prioritize upgrades in program increments which minimizes business impacts and burnouts.

I'm bad about this - I have high expectations for my team and I may not do enough to always recognize their achievements. The flip side is I don't beat them up when/if things don't go well. One thing to foster is an attitude of succeeding or failing as a team, individual contributions will be recognized but a highly functioning team is worth more than a group of individuals all contributing on their own.

This is one I've recently had to learn the hard way. One benefit of sprinting is you can slot in the work that needs to be done and you can spot when someone from the team is getting overloaded. Plus, if priorities shift (and they always do), you plan for it by shifting other work out of the way to make room for your team to focus on what you need them to focus on. It takes a lot of administration, and a lot of work, but the benefits of being organized cannot be overstated.

Valorize o trabalho de cada membro da equipe. Reconheça os esforços individuais e as conquistas em grupo. Pequenos gestos, como um elogio público ou um presente surpresa, podem fazer uma grande diferença. Sempre que possível, ofereça flexibilidade aos seus colaboradores, permitindo que eles organizem seu tempo de trabalho da forma que melhor se adapte às suas necessidades. Delegar tarefas e conceder autonomia também contribui para aumentar a sensação de responsabilidade e empoderamento.