Innovate to Save’s Teams and Collaboration workshop (10 and 11 April, 2017) was designed to give participants some practical tools and advice to help put together a successful innovation team, to map project stakeholders and ensure that the right people with the right skills and responsibilities are involved in your project from day one. In this post, we’re sharing some top tips and resources from that workshop.

Why building a strong team is important

Working together enables people to apply a mix of skills that go beyond the scope of one individual, helping you to coordinate activities towards a bigger common goal. This is why it’s so important to have the right team in place to develop your ideas. Having a good team in place ensures mutual support and help for team members, it gives people a sense of belonging and can enhance communication and commitment to a project. This can also help you understand how different stakeholders and organisations relate to your work and each other too.

Top 5 tips for building teams

1. Having shared goals that are clearly communicated to the team helps ensure effective collaboration.

2. The process of mapping, organising and communicating both the jobs to be done and the people responsible for carrying out the work are key to ensuring that the team has a shared vision and is working to a set of common goals.

3. Think about the skills, attitudes, traits and abilities needed by different members of the team to be successful.

4. The wider picture – consider which other factors might play a role in your team getting the job done. How can you manage the effects of these issues on your work?

5. Try and gain an understanding of the external partnerships and systems that are integral to your business (or which may cause issues?).

Top tools and resources to build teams

1. Jobs to be done worksheet

2. Superpowers worksheet 

3. People and connections worksheet 

4. Building partnerships map

More about the workshop and Innovate to Save

Innovate to Save has been set up to support new ideas that have the potential to generate cashable savings for Welsh public services and improve the quality of service delivery. The programme places as much emphasis on providing the right support and tools to develop robust project proposals as it does the funds to allow organisations to achieve change. During phase 1 of the programme the support on offer takes the form of a series of workshops that have been designed to support different parts of the application form to participate in the R&D phase of Innovate to Save. Read more about the programme.

The slides from this workshop can be found here.

If you’d like to find out more about the workshops or the Innovate to Save programme, please get in touch:

Angharad: [email protected] / 029 2251 0320

Kelly: [email protected]