Part skunkworks and part scrum, Delta Teams leverage cross-functional creativity to tackle an organization’s most critical challenges related to manufacturing and product innovation.

Why Delta Teams?

Under the right conditions, Delta Teams are highly effective at creating meaningful change. The groups we’ve worked with have achieved cost savings on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars; process innovations that have led to breakthrough products; technology development initiatives that have borne (profitable) fruit for years; and more.

While the path to success isn’t always linear, and the solution rarely takes a form that anyone predicted, these teams almost always accomplish incredibly positive results.

How It Works

Delta Teams Process

 

Step 1: Focus on a Big Problem

Choose a challenge that leadership is deeply invested in resolving — otherwise, the team will struggle to get traction.

Step 2: Identify Your Stakeholders

Key Delta Team stakeholders include the Executive Sponsor, who will champion the project; an energetic and highly organized Team Lead; and other executives or board members who will need to buy in to the process.

Step 3: Form Your Team

The ideal Delta Team is composed of 12-15 participants who demonstrate exceptional problem-saving capabilities and represent a broad range of functional expertise. This team will be supported by administrative staff and experienced external facilitators from Newry who will help guide the conversation, capture information, and provide an independent perspective.

Step 4: Frame the Problem

The first few meetings of the Delta Team group should focus on perfecting the problem statement, which defines the scope of the effort and forms the basis of all future activities.

Step 5: Develop Solutions

Group members start to brainstorm, create, test, and refine solutions, meeting every few weeks to share progress and running experiments in between touchpoints.

Step 6: Implement and Disband

Once the group has aligned on and fleshed out the winning solution or solutions (which may include new products, processes, workstreams, etc.), they hand it off to the appropriate individual or team that will implement it within the organization, catalog all concepts and progress notes in a final report to the sponsor, and disband.

Thought Leadership

Delta Teams

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