Effective team efforts result in dozens and sometimes more
than a hundred individual commitments that must be woven into action plans to be accomplished in order to reach the team's
goals.
The effective team leader will establish a status reporting system
that keeps all team members focused on their individual commitments. Such a periodic status reporting system must be
at the core of a discipline that drives personal accountability. These systems allow the team leader and other team
members to monitor their individual and team progress to identify barriers in a timely manner.
We have worked with several Internet-based commitment management
systems, including one we specified and help nurture into existence. This system grew out of the Accountability Tracking
Module (ATM) System we specified and developed as outlined in the "About Us" page in this site. We have used this system in selected
situations where quick implementation of a commitment management system was required with a limited number of individuals.
The ASP architecture of this system permited the addition of users without installing software on individual systems.
Under the guidance of an former partner, this Virtual Commitment System evolved to support the special internal control review
and certification requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
We have also worked with commitment management systems that
were developed specifically to support large organizations in the management of goals, action plans and commitments. Many of these systems require client software to be installed on each users
system in order to share data through the .net architecture used in many Internet based applications. These systems
are good options for organizations that wish to commit a large group to the use of a common commitment management
system.
We have extensive experience in the implementation and use of commitment
management systems. Our experiences clearly indicate that organizations which implement these systems without a
strong discipline of personal accountability will invariably fail to gain the expected benefits of the selected systems and
will remove the systems from use within months of implementation.
We urge any organization that is considering the implementation
of a commitment management system to consider our "Dynamic Teamwork Readiness Review Program" in preparation for the implementation of the selected system.
This program assesses and identifies critical success factors that must be addressed as a precursor to the successful implementation
of any commitment management system.
