It’s not just the players on the field who are part of Australian cricket’s best teams. Behind the scenes is a technology leadership team that takes out the title of Cricket Australia’s No.1 performing team on its nation-wide Microsoft Teams network.

SWOOP Analytics assessed almost 100,000 teams in Microsoft Teams as part of its 2021 Microsoft Teams Benchmarking Report and ranked Cricket Australia’s Tech Leadership team in the top 0.2%, based on high productivity measures.

Cricket Australia’s Tech Leadership team has a simple formula for success. The team interacts.

When someone posts in Teams, it sparks discussion, it leads to conversation, collaboration and innovation.

“There is never a dead, silent post,” said Emma Cashen, Cricket Australia’s Manager of Technology Adoption.

“There will always be a discussion off the back of a post, and that’s despite the fact that we actually meet on a weekly basis.”

It sounds simple. Emma assures us it is.

Keep the team numbers down

One of Emma’s first pieces of advice is to keep team numbers down. There’s no need to invite everyone into the team just to give them a voice. Make sure those in the team are those who need to be there.

In the Tech Leadership team there are just eight members, and every one has a voice.

“What I’m really impressed with, in the Tech Leadership team, I wouldn’t say it’s a heavily active site as such, it’s because of the fact that there are limited posts but the replies, the mentions, the likes, that come back on that are high content,” Emma said.
“The content itself is rich content rather than dead content.”

Ensuring the correct people are in your team means everyone interacts, usually on a daily basis. Emma said having the right people in the right teams also “quiets the noise” on Teams because you’re receiving notifications only for work you need to address.

What does a high performing team look like?

Australian women’s cricket team after winning the One Day International against New Zealand in a series whitewash.Image courtesy of www.cricket.com.au — Australian women’s cricket team after winning the One Day International against New Zealand in a series whitewash.
Image courtesy of www.cricket.com.au

Cricket Australia’s Tech Leadership team has seven clearly defined channels on its team site – General, finance, people, planning, security, operations and, something that’s become a necessity during the past year, COVID-19 issues.

The team reports back up the chain and uses the team site to work on budget discussions, steering committees, contracts, onboarding and so on.

The team runs all its meetings from the team channel on Teams, not through Outlook, ensuring all recordings, files and discussion remain in the team.

“We don’t need to worry about who’s in the team and making sure it’s in calendars,” Emma said.

“We can quite easily post in here and talk about it at a Teams meeting. We keep things rolling, so we don’t wait for those meetings. Sometimes we get to those meetings and we’re like; ‘What do we need to discuss?’, because it’s all happening very quickly in the team site.”

Chat versus Channels

Australian Test player Glenn Maxwell.Image courtesy of www.cricket.com.au — Australian Test player Glenn Maxwell.
Image courtesy of www.cricket.com.au

Emma said there’s a clear divide as to when to use chat and when to use channels in Teams. At Cricket Australia, if you cross the line, there’s every chance your chat will end up in the team channel, where it should have been in the first place.

“The chat is for; ‘I’m going to be late’, or ‘Hey, did anyone see…’,” said Emma.

“Where we’re trying to plan for an agenda, that’s in a channel. What’s the future history? If I pick up and leave tomorrow, is my replacement going to need this history? Yes? Well, it needs to be in the channel.”

Emma will literally copy and paste the chat into the team channel.

“If I’m seeing it from our users’ perspective, and they’re complaining about the noise, it’s actually the chats that become noisy,” she said.

“The channels, if you’ve got rich content coming in there and you’re thinking through your responses a bit more, it’s a better conversation rather than just flicking off comments here and there.

“If you’re putting it into a channel, you’ve got a bit more assurance you’re posting things that are productive and useful. It’s about saying; ‘What history do you want our teams to have and what content?’ and if that’s rich content that is for history purposes, or could be useful in the future, then put it in the channel and then the chat becomes that more casual, ad hoc stuff.”

Another advantage of using channels over chat is linking conversations to files, meaning discussions don’t get lost, Emma said.

“I really like that Teams conversations bundle it all together and it’s very targeted,” she said.

“Unless somebody accidently splits conversation, you’ve got the entire trail there.”

No emailing files

Cricket Australia’s Tech Leadership team has a rule – no emailing files!

“And if anyone does, it gets forwarded directly to the Teams channel,” Emma said.

It was one of the “rules” the team established in the early days, to share files in the team and if an email is sent that is related to the team work, it gets copied into Teams.

“As a team, we have consciously spoken about these decisions and when we designed our channels we laid that out,” Emma said.

“It’s all about making sure that as we have a conversation, we agreed on best practice and how we were going to use that site, we’re using it in accordance with that and where somebody doesn’t, we correct it.

“If it goes into the chat, it automatically gets pushed out and pushed back into the Teams site and we’re holding each other accountable for it.”

As trainer for Teams across Cricket Australia, Emma will also join other team sites and show users how to best use their team.

“I sit in them for a period of time and point out things,” she said.

The Teams journey

Cricket Australia was one of the first organisations in the world to begin using Microsoft Teams back in late 2015. It was implemented across the national body and eight state and territory bodies to be a tool where everyone could collaborate and communicate, no matter where you were. It immediately reduced the number of face-to-face meetings, which usually required people to fly across the country to meet.

Prior to Teams, each state and territory body had its own tools and Emma described working together as “extremely difficult” while “the organisations as a whole were struggling to communicate with each other and the only way to make that work was to fly interstate and figure out how to make this work”.

With Teams, Cricket Australia had the ability to create sites that were not department or structure based, or based upon who your manager is, for better collaboration. Since 2019, Cricket Australia has been using SWOOP Analytics to track and measure collaboration across the organisation.

“We very quickly realised that Teams was going to be the core collaboration tool,” Emma said.

“What we’re trying to say to people is create teams for the work that you’re doing as opposed to the department that you sit in.

“It’s about delivering to the people that need it, wherever they are, no matter what entity they are.

“The benefit of Teams allowed us to be able to break down what (state or territory) organisation you are actually a part of and making sure we’re delivering the best outcomes for cricket as a whole.”

How far is your reach across the organisation?

If there are gaps in collaboration and communication, SWOOP will show where they are, no matter where people are located geographically.

“It’s about us seeing how the widespread collaboration is happening, breaking down that entity,” Emma said.
“I can go into SWOOP and see who I’m talking to across the country and not just within my organisation. That, to us, is more valuable than me talking to the person that technically should sit next to me.”

Part of Cricket Australia’s SWOOP for Teams dashboard for the Technology Leadership team.

With SWOOP, Emma said she can easily see how far her reach is across the organisation and change behaviours accordingly. Executives and leaders are also benchmarked with SWOOP to see their online personas and given tips on how to improve their collaboration style.

“SWOOP shows us how far our reach is and how are we collaborating as an organisation as a whole,” Emma said.