5.1 Examples for WFT-Projects

At the beginning of using teamdecoder, there is always a “team with a challenge.” Over time, we have come to know and learn how to solve various challenges. These are the WFT (Workforce Transformation) Challenges.

Here are a few examples:

Team Formation

The ideal scenario for us: A company wants to set up a new department or task force, and we work together with the leadership to define how the team should be structured. We clarify which skills, roles, topics, and interfaces will play a major role and which employees are suitable for the team.

This could be, for example, a new marketing department with newly hired employees who will be fully dedicated to the team. But it could also be a task force, working group, or staff function in which employees spend only part of their time, while their “home” remains in another department.

With teamdecoder, you can model roles and groups effectively without assigning people to them—until you've found a structure you'd like to implement in practice.

Team Growth

When new teams are successful, they tend to grow quickly, bringing in new colleagues and taking on new responsibilities. However, this carries the risk of growing organically, without planning, and inefficiently. Communication deteriorates, quality drops, and success declines.

With teamdecoder, teams can maintain clarity and transparency at every stage of the team lifecycle. When new people join, roles are assigned to them immediately. Does this free up time for someone else or not?

When new tasks arise, they are immediately documented as roles and distributed accordingly. Is the workload still manageable, or do priorities need to be adjusted?

By keeping a constant overview in this way, the team can manage its growth much more effectively.

Team Downsizing

Given the current economic climate, many teams unfortunately have to shrink. teamdecoder can support this process by helping to prevent burnout among the remaining workforce and enabling a reprioritization of work.

It may sound harsh, but it’s extremely practical:
If you remove five people in teamdecoder, all roles that are now unassigned or understaffed are automatically highlighted in red — making it immediately clear which elements require attention.

Key questions include:

• Which roles will be reassigned to others?

• What responsibilities can they give up to make time for the new ones?

• What tasks can be put on hold for now due to lack of capacity?

• What can be outsourced to external providers or delegated to AI?

Here’s an example of how teamdecoder supports downsizing:

Team Mergers

Mergers or M&As occur when one company acquires another, or when, for example, two departments within a company are merged under new leadership.

With teamdecoder, you can set up both teams in a shared board and begin the process of consolidation or differentiation.

Key questions to address:

• What is duplicated?

• What needs to be redistributed?

• What work is identical?

• What is complementary?

• etc.

Operationalizing New (Company) Strategies

When “the people at the top” come up with a new strategy — for example, something like “Customer Centricity” or “Agile Working” — it’s always up to the teams to adapt and implement it in their own context.

If a strategy is meant to have an impact on day-to-day work (and it should, otherwise what’s the point?), it needs to be translated into roles, responsibilities, and groups in order to be put into action.

In this process, teamdecoder can serve as an enablement tool for leaders, as it provides a kind of “management cockpit” to guide the transformation, clearly define and communicate expectations and goals, and adjust them when needed.

For us as consultants, it’s a fantastic collaboration tool to support leadership coaching — to work together on identifying what still needs to be done and how to implement those steps effectively.

New Leadership

A new manager always brings fresh energy, new ideas, and a different way of working.

In an ideal world, all managers would work with teamdecoder and use it to hand over their teams to each other seamlessly — but that’s just my personal wishful thinking ;)

In reality, we as consultants can use teamdecoder to support new leaders exceptionally well: helping them get to know their team, understand current workflows, document everything, and then collaboratively analyze and optimize it.

When I join a new team and get to know the team members through interviews, I always use a new, empty teamdecoderboard as a notepad. Without openly showing it to the team, I can jot down who I meet, what they do, who they collaborate with on which topics, etc.—and at the same time start building ideas for the future.

As a consultant, I teach a new leader how to use teamdecoder to get the most out of it.

Reorganization

Whether the specific team wants it or not, sometimes major changes are on the horizon within a company—changes that don’t originate from the team itself but will definitely impact it.

As consultants, we can support the company’s leadership in shaping what the reorganization should look like—for example, by creating an overview of all teams and running through the restructuring like a simulation.

Alternatively, we can focus on specific consequences and assist with implementation. These are cases like the ones described above—such as a merger, downsizing, etc.

Other

And then there are the countless everyday topics in teams that don’t quite fit into these big categories:

• Sometimes a team simply needs a general role clarification because it’s completely unclear who is doing what or making which decisions.

• Sometimes a team’s efficiency has dropped drastically, and no one really knows why. It needs to be analyzed first in order to resolve inefficiencies.

• Some teams want a supervision session to check whether everything is set up correctly and working as intended.

• Etc.

Links

• Knowledge Base - specific Case Studies: https://teamdecoder.tawk.help/category/use-cases