Recently I spoke to CIO writer Sharon Florentine about how to identify IT teams likely to be successful with product delivery. Her story, How to Create High-Performing Project Management Teams, includes a lot of insight we’ve learned over the years from our customers. Companies building complex products face increased pressure to bring products to market faster and exceed customer needs. With these challenges, CIOs need to decide whether they are “victors”—invest in areas of differentiation, innovation—or “victims”—invest defensively in technologies that keep the lights on.

Guess which teams see more product success? Organizations and IT teams that self-identify as victors see product delivery as an opportunity to innovate, to provide a new level of business value for their organizations. Victors recognize that success comes down to informed decision-making, You make decisions based on context, and to do so your employees need empowerment and authority, and to be able to gauge the impact on the business as a whole, too. These CIOs concern themselves with how to get project teams more engaged so they can spend their time innovating and creating rather than focusing on the minutia of their specific tasks and on putting out fires. Success depends on empowering your people to make good decisions as quickly as possible.

Victims are constantly cutting costs, locking down processes, micromanaging… and they struggle with complexity and change. Because of this mindset, many organizations become so focused on controlling the production and delivery process that they miss the mark of what the customer really wanted.

We’ve identified three things IT victors commit to:

• Bringing their people in: Teams that are brought fully into the entire product delivery process see themselves as key business drivers and delivery better results.
• Empowering their teams: People make better decisions when they understand the ‘Big Picture’ and when they’re empowered. They’ll also give more effort.
• Focusing on outcomes:  A focus on overall outcomes versus a focus on individual features will deliver better benefits to customers and drive adoption.

By engaging and empowering their teams while focusing on outcomes over features, IT victors are building better products. Customers expect more from the products they buy than ever before and it’s the companies that can listen, collaborate and deliver that will win out.

Read the article, How to Create High-Performing Project Management Teams and learn more about the Jama solution for product delivery.