Telenor Xpress 4 - 2000

GO TEAM
Telenor Media's New Economy Group-Think

The new economy demands a new approach to management. Telenor Media is promoting innovation in team management from the top-down and bottom-up.
Telenor Media - a division of Telenor that develops and distributes information products such as residential, business and electronic telephone directories for international markets.

Telenor Media - a division of Telenor that develops and distributes information products such as residential, business and electronic telephone directories for international markets.

In the mid-1980s a journalist from The Washington Post Magazine described a manager that "oversees six firstrate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats."

Telenor Media has 2,400 employees working in fields ranging from sales to technical solutions to distribution in ten European countries; that is a lot of cats. How does a company like Telenor Media organise all of these workers?

Telenor Media has found, like many other companies in IT and telecommunications, that a project- or team-oriented approach not only gets the job done; it also creates some unexpected synergies, happier employees and lower costs. For this reason, project leadership and management have full focus from top-level management to the individual team-level.

ORGANISATION-WIDE
Until May 2000, Vidar Lauritsen was head of sales in Yellow Pages at Telenor Media's Oslo office. At that time, he was asked to lead a customer strategy project that would span the Telenor Media organisation. Not surprisingly, he decided to bring his team-based thinking from sales over to his new work.

"Sales had been organised into teams for over ten years," says Lauritsen. "Salesmen competed against each other and against other teams. Therefore, they were encouraged to excel individually and as a team. The team leader acted as a coach for his team."

According to Lauritsen, his new customer strategy project incorporates manifold initiatives and organisational adjustments, but the overriding vision is to improve Telenor Media's customer contact and satisfaction.

"Organisation and recruitment are two areas in which we hope to implement a more team-oriented approach. By segmenting the market into industrial areas, Telenor Media will organise its customer contact around people with specific competence and knowledge in each industrial area," says Lauritsen.

According to Lauritsen, the primary challenge to teambased working is communication between different departments within Telenor Media. But, he says, the company instituted an ongoing training programme in 1996/97 that brings leaders together, schools them in "group-think" and gives them solid cross-departmental connections. These initiatives do not solve, but help to address organisational problems.

Lauritsen concludes: "Getting a true teamwork mindset established in-house is the best way to get customers to feel like a part of the Telenor Media team."

TEAMS UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
Some team efforts involve the entire Telenor Media organisation (like Lauritsen's work), but the vast majority occur at lower levels throughout the company.

One such team is a constellation of technicians, salesmen and marketers, all working to establish an online white pages (residential listings) service for the domestic Norwegian market: www.telefonkatalogen.no. Pre-analysis of the enterprise began in February 2000, the project was officially launched in May and it is scheduled to wrap up in 2001.

Team leader John-Ivar Andresen has been involved since February. For over two years, he has been a project manager with Telenor Media's New Media department (encompassing all electronic forms of publication). His experience with team-working at Telenor Media stretches back over a decade.

"There is a definite change in attitude at Telenor towards more team- or project-oriented work," says Andresen. "It is an excellent way to organise a large staff with multiple tasks to be completed quickly and simultaneously. We have had between 20 and 25 people working on the project from 10 per cent to 100 per cent of their time since April."

Telenor Media puts together projects through a searchable database. Employees with key competence for a project are sought after and pulled into a project to the extent that they are needed. Conversations with numerous Telenor Media employees made it clear that project involvement is prized by the staff.

One crucial aspect of a teamwork approach is ensuring that all of the different units communicate well. Tight organisation is the basis for good communication.

Andresen has four to five group leaders each in charge of one aspect of the project; he meets with these once a week. Each of these group leaders, in turn, has a small team working under him or her.

Communication is further enhanced by an open floor plan, where technicians, managers and salesmen are grouped together. In addition, up to six members of the team that are working primarily on this project sit in an assigned project room during their involvement.

"Good teamwork cuts the number of meetings we need by half, while significantly improving internal communication," says Andresen.

As of late November, Andresen and Telenor Media's online white pages project was on schedule. Next year, Andresen and his team-mates will have moved on to new projects. Each will be a bit wiser. Abit more team-oriented

BUILDING TEAM COMPETENCE
Teamwork is an organisational priority. All of Telenor's business groups and management groups are pushing to professionalise this style of work. At Telenor Media, one coaching project called ProProff, undertaken by in-house experts and hired-in consultants, sought to develop the organisation's project management through individual tutoring and courses in early 2000.

Jan Sørensen contributed to the project. "Telenor had a very specific demand: make project management more professional," says Sørensen. "We arranged six workshops and personalised follow-ups for fifteen project managers and ten board members. We focused on building teams in an environment of documents, templates and timing."

Courses, strategic initiatives and individual coaching are three ways Telenor Media is building up its teamoriented competence. These are taking place in Norway and at Telenor Media's companies throughout Europe. John-Ivar Andresen sums up: "There are different ways to solve a problem. And I'm learning all the time."



Text by: Ryan Skinner