Team collaboration
Robby Russell
Secondly... we're still here. I spent a lot of time over the holiday
season thinking about d3 and what I personally would like to see come
from these discussions.
Ruby-expert, Chad Fowler, posted the following on his blog today.
"Regardless of how good the team, if communication is impaired
between the domain experts and the technology experts, things are
going to move slowly, and wrong software is going to be created."
This immediate reminded me of some of the discussions we've had on
the list between clients and development teams. But, we haven't
talked too much about the development team itself. This is an area
that I would like to discuss in more detail. So... to start off a
discussion, I will ask the following.
Within the context of team collaboration...
* What ingredients do you feel are necessary for healthy team
collaboration?
* How do you go about identifying a problem within your team?
* How do you go about resolving a problem with the team?
Let's discuss. :-)
-Robby
--
Robby Russell
http://www.robbyonrails.com/
http://www.planetargon.com/
Robert Dempsey
A good topic, especially from the PM point of view. Here are my
initial thoughts:
* What ingredients do you feel are necessary for healthy team
collaboration?
- Personalities on the team work well together (i.e. no clashing
personalities, and if there are, findig common ground).
- Multiple methods of communication: email, IM, phone, online collab
tools, etc.
- A central point of communication where resolutions can be tracked.
We save the "what should we do" discussions for phone, email, IM and
in-person meetings, and put the results of that dialogue in the
central system. Typing in every single details may be worthwhile, but
cuts into productivity enormously.
- Open, honest and professional dialogue.
- Trust.
* How do you go about identifying a problem within your team?
- People stop talking with each other or asking questions. Usually
something is up at this point.
* How do you go about resolving a problem with the team?
- Continuous discussion with the team (almost to the point of
annoyance). We also stick within our organizational structure, as
certain people are closer to the dev team than others. We each play to
our strengths, and this works very well for us.
I look forward to seeing the responses of others.
---
Robert Dempsey
http://www.techcfl.com
http://www.railsforall.org