LBi CPD

It’s all in the blend

2010 saw a range of changes across the business for us at LBi that we needed to respond to in a growing and speedy fashion. L&D as a result cannot and does not sit with one person. Teams are encouraged to carry out their own L&D activities that they see are relevant and meaningful for them. As such we’ve seen a range of things happening of which I’m positively beaming about.

Creative

These guys hold a weekly Friday Fun meeting. They come together, get given a brief and have 20-30 minutes to crack the problem. It’s not business critical, the outcome doesn’t matter, and there’s no pressure on what they produce. So what happens? They unleash their joint creative force and come up with brilliant concepts that’s what. And, importantly, they’re able to take those fresh eyes and apply different thinking to their daily work and produce inspired creative work.

User Experience Architect

Two forms of meetings are held with this sharp thinking team. Mini-mamas and Big-mamas! I could just leave it at those names, because quite frankly they are brilliant. But, let’s not. The purpose of these meetings is to present some inspired findings and insights team members have come across that they want to share with their peers. This isn’t about showing off. This is about finding those things which go beyond best in class. They enter a realm of Jedi like meditation. And what do these guys do with it? Design some of the best insightful user experience formats you’ve ever come across.

Delivery Management

How many project managers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? This lot don’t care about the lightbulb. They care about the team they work with to come up with the plan. They’re not masters of their game for nothing. They have rare insight into each and every discipline across the business. And they have that because they actively seek out information from the business. And what they deliver is often beyond expectations of the client, and certainly beyond expectations of the groups they work with.

Technology

How do you keep a traditionally detail focused group engaged in creative activities? Simples. Include them in all of the above. We don’t let our teams sit by themselves. They blend together by being at each other’s meetings. They then come together, take that information and decide – as a Tech group what can we produce? I mean come on, have you seen Christmas Collaboration, Infi-Knit and David’s BeeBeard? They are the folk who made all those happen and more.

I’ve selected 4 departments from the power house that is LBi. If that’s what these 4 can do, can you imagine what the rest of the departments are doing too?

Project Management at LBi

This is a guest post from Nick Langton, Head of Delivery Management at LBi Ltd.

——-

We structure the team into bi-weekly project meetings. These meetings are broken into new business lines or services that have come into LBi. It’s a chance to feedback and review from sunset reviews, and to disseminate knowledge throughout the department of potential issues or working pratcies that benfitted the project.

We also have a number of brown bag lunches every 2 weeks that allow for detailed descriptions of services and key contacts in the agency to the delivery management team. Other fundamentals such as project planning, risk management, and use of Tempos are also delivered in these sessions.

Underpinning all of this we use the LBi performance review structure to identify 4-5 key company objectives that are distributed to the project team and identify 3-4 personal learning objectives such as development of skills in specific areas such as CMS implementation, mobile app development or financial services.

We train our Leader level project managers (and above) to Prince2 Practitioner qualifications and we have a core team of Agile project manager who are trained in Scrum Master methodology. Currently about 60% of the team have Prince2, and we’re looking to raise this 75% over the next 2 years.

Effectively all this activity means that our team are best placed to work with the range of services we have on offer, understand how they work, what deliverables they produce, and how they meet our clients’ needs and business goals.