High-Performing IT Teams: 7 Winning Traits

One of the best ways for IT leaders to improve their teams’ performance is to emulate the characteristics of the world's best IT organizations. But what are those characteristics? What do great IT teams do that sets them apart from the rest of the pack?

To answer those questions, team management and collaboration software vendor Atlassian recently commissioned a survey conducted by HDI, a professional association for the technical support industry and part of UBM. In February and March 2017, researchers asked IT professionals a series of questions about their strategy, goals, metrics, technology, tools and approaches. They then looked for characteristics that set apart high-performing teams from the lower performers.

For the purposes of the study, they assumed that organizations where IT is tightly aligned with the business would perform better than teams without the same alignment, explained Sid Suri, the head of IT strategy for Atlassian. "Part of the hypothesis of the study overall is that the IT teams that will do the best in the future are the ones that are going to be aligned with the business," Suri said.

The researchers crosschecked that assumption by asking survey respondents to rate their level of maturity. Those teams that scored highly on five key measures of alignment also gave themselves high scores for maturity, making it very likely that these teams are high performers.

Continue on to see what traits the study found are common among high-performing IT teams.

(Image: Lucian BOLCA/Shutterstock)