Skip to main content

Team Spirit

"You should have a Team Spirit" - you could hear this from the team building trainer. It is funny because they usually works alone but I agree with them.

I believe that a good team is precondition for a success:

be together
if some members of the team are at Bratislava and others at California, where is the Team Spirit? Probably somewhere deep in Atlantic Ocean

common goal
we have ours personal goals but in the team work we need to agree on one common goal. This team goal must be written somewhere in the team room where everybody could see it every day. It is very good sometimes re-ensure that everybody understands the goal the same way

respect
we are human beings and without mutual respect we are just wasting our time and only pretending team spirit

pleasure to work together
usually we spend more then 8 hour a day together and if it is painful it cannot lasts for a long time

good mix
different personalities and skills which complete each others are very welcome. If I like to do task A and hate task B and my colleague likes task B and hates task A it is best deal. Uniformity is not the unity

allow to make mistake
everybody makes mistakes, it is good if all people in the team accept this fact. Of course repeat the same mistake again and again is stupid and it is out of this rule

cooperation over competition
human body works well if every parts cooperate nicely together. I do not see any reason for "employee of month" style because in fact result is one winner and a lot of losers or performance measurement based on Gauss curve without any reflection of reality

m3 factor
"one for all, all for one" is motto from famous adventure-romantic book but still actual. The truth is that we succeed together and fail together so: "I will carry you if you carry me" is very reasonable deal

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Senior or Junior

Usually companies call young employees Juniors and more experienced Seniors. Sometimes you need to just sit and wait and it will come. Sooner or later. From my point of view it is not enough. I met a lot of old employees they call themselves Seniors but they behave like Juniors. So I defined my point of view on Seniority: professional simple understand what I am doing and understand reason why I am doing it can coach others this is very basic; who can coach others is just fine but who can coach others to became a new coaches is super not genius but have deep knowledge on some specialized parts geniality is overestimated, we do not need "magical guru", to be expert is good enough; if you are "one to go" when there is problem, it is OK big picture overview it is not probably possible to understand a whole system in details but it is necessary to have at least overview know what I know and know what I do not know to see myself in correct light is very

Software Engineer

Recently my company expanded the Software Engineer positions in my team. This leads me to thinking about the skills which are necessary for these positions. So I prepared a list of qualities which I think are important for a good Software Engineer. Abstract concept modelling This is essential and there is no room for discussion on this because this is what we do. Love to code It does not matter if you are 15 or 50 or if you write code 10% or 90% of your time, code writing is crucial. Team player The surgeon style teams (one genius with helpers) are obsolete, I prefer real team players who are able to work towards a common goal and share responsibilities. Communicative Silent geeks siting in the corner with a notebook on their knees are not cool any more, we need to talk to each other, we need to be able explain technical stuff to non technical managers, we need to be able to choose the right phrase at the right time. Take responsibility There is no quali

Anti-Lean Quotes

Set of quotes which usually highlights Anti-Lean behavior Create waste instead of Eliminate waste ' Developer who is not working at least on 4 projects is not properly utilized ' - less is definitely more and only done-done work counts by end of the day, limited work in progress is helping to focus on right priorities ' In case of any network issues please create a ticket on the help desk system at our partner's web-page' - creating catch 22 situations by design is craziness, such a process does not make any sense 'Yes, this is what our customers really need but could we add also this small feature, just in the case?' - extra feature creates an extra complexity, it is better to stay focused on real value and make it great for the users ' I know that you are working on the top priority but I am sure that you can do also this small task till noon' - probably there will be nothing really done by noon, task switching is more expensiv

Scrum rollout

Would you like to start with Scrum in your team? These are few hints from my experience how to make this process smooth, iterative & incremental: get commitment from the management & team define reason: why would you like to do Scrum? what problems it should solve for you? start with simple Kanban in one team: it is easier, you just need to manage 3 lists: backlog (todo), work in progress and done  focus on right priorities of backlog - person who defines the priorities will be 'product owner' setup quick way how to track work in progress and indicate 'impediments' -> daily stand-up; max 15 minutes meeting every day - moderator of the meeting will be 'scrum master', he will be also responsible for solving the 'impediments' focus on dependencies between the tasks to avoid 'impediments' start to put 'discoveries' into the backlog to pre-analyze tasks; discoveries should be done by architect or analyst what is the busi

Agile is not a religion

It is quite annoying to me when argument during discussion is like this:  it must be XY because the book says it. It is kind of: Bible is saying XY so we have to follow = end of discussion.  I am not very happy in such a case because we probably do not understand principles and just trying to blindly imitate something without deep knowledge of the matter. I prefer to admit it or show personal standpoint.