Table of Contents

Teamwork

Teamwork

• What is a Team ?
• How to communicate
• Team Hygiene
• Communication Rules

Teamwork

What is a Team ?

A Team is more than a group of people. Becoming an effective team takes time and effort.

From (13) we learn that a common target is a precondition for building a team out of a group. If there exist no clear measurable and well accepted target the group will flow into political discussions without becoming a team.

There exist the following obstructions becoming a team (giving up individual goals and go after the team goal):

1. time consuming meetings (overhead will be high in team building phase)
2. dependency from others (trust)
3. acceptance of different meanings from others (openness)
4. effects from faults made by other team members (helping each other)

For building a team individual and team responsibility must come into a balance. The sharing of responsibility for achieving the team goal needs the ability to trust into others. On the other hand individuals will be punished or rewarded. When becoming a team everybody must change his or her behavior - adapt it to the others - finding/changing his/her role. This needs discipline.

Another important precondition is that the team combines different skills. If you have a group consisting only of C-programmers (no design skills, no business domain knowledge ....) the view on the problem to be solved would be too one sided. A real team consists of a group of people combining different skills and found a way to put their different views together to a more global one. No team can be complete. But real teams are learning fast by helping each other. The variety of skills also lead to different roles in different phases of the project. Beside technical skills interpersonal skills ( communication, constructive solution of conflicts, risk taking, helpful critics, active lisening, motivation of others, acceptance of interests of others).

Effective teams are normally not greater than 10-15 people. Above this limit the communication overhead is too high. Therefore it might be necessary for a project to define sub goals and building sub teams to achieve the appropriate sizes for teams.

A good example of a team are flying geese. The common goal is reaching the same destination. Motivation and help in difficult situations makes it possible to trust each other. The leadership is sequenced.

The combination of teams might influence the design of a product !! Important points:

1. location of team members: does it lead to subgroups ?
2. distance between subgroups
3. skill distribution
4. language and cultural differences

If the project team is scattered into several long distance subgroups it might be necessary to decompose the application into components each handled by one subgroup.

Beside the technical process also communication and decision paths and rules for sub teams has to be defined. The processes should support decisions and communication an not hinder them. A process does not support the teams when the process practiced differ from the planed one too much.

Communication Pathes

When setting up a project and project team(s) communication and decision paths have to be defined. The following list gives a slight idea:

Delegation

Assignment of tasks to existing persons. Every NN in the list means an incomplete list. Every assignment should be associated with a percentage number telling how much the assigned person will be working on this task. This list is consistent of overall planned people months for this task are assigned to persons.

Responsibility / Decisions

Must be consistent with delegated tasks. Everybody needs the correct empowerment for her assigned task. (That is not everywhere the case.) Everybody must also be conscious about the limits of its empowerment. (f.e. Developer checks if the user's guide is technically correct, but not style and layout. The writer is responsible for these and does the final decision.)

Handling of change requests

A checklist has to be prepared for any sort of change request. The list contains all persons / institutions (customer, vendor, other departments, controlling) need to agree to the change request or need to give input ( estimates on costs and resources, description of interface changes, ...). This list must include all parties affected by the change. F.e. an external interface change affects customer, vendors, tester, infomation development and implementers.

Problem Handling

Everybody working on a deliverable can run into problems not fixable by herself. Such problems must be reported, analyzed, fixed, and checked. Additional any problem reported will be tracked and measured to check the quality of the product. Normally the person running into a problem reports it. For all other steps rules have to be made to avoid struggles about responsibilities. The goal is to solve a problem and not to push them to the desk of somebody else. Everybody knowing any affected area of the problem should help in analyzing/ solving it. This is difficult in an environment where individuals are strongly measured by problems/ work item. An appropriate handling of faults and problems needs a good "team hygiene".

Handling of project delays

this is a special sort of problem where normally also management is involved.

Tracking of Process

This is part of project management. But every team has to think about how to track their part of the process, check and measure their performance. F.e. as a implementer I should always know how much time I need for the items still to do (current position in the process) and how good I did items ( quality, performance).

Team Hygiene

1. Responsibility The precondition for delegating responsibility to others is confidence and acceptance. The team members accept strength and weakness of each individual and trust in her decisions. (F.e. Different programming styles are permitted. Each style has advantages and disadvantages. Nobody can dictate a style, but the team may agree on coding/ naming conventions.)
2. Motivation In a team everybody must appreciate the work of any other. Struggling about competencies will destroy the team and makes it ineffective. Very important is that 'Donkey work' is delegated well balanced. Everybody will give the best input to the team if her/his strengths are used well and is supported in her/his weak points (example of the geese).
3. Delegation In the ideal team the work is distributed by the team itself. Everybody has her/his preferences and experiences. You could say everybody in a team has its "ecological corner". These will be accepted in an ideal team. Problems occur if there are too many persons in one corner and other corners are empty (Donkey work). Here the team must come to a consense. A member feeling cheated will never belong to this team but works against it.

Important is not to distribute project phases but project components. F.e. Never devide Design and coding totally. In the OO process design and coding flow into each other and should be done by one person for a component.

4. Control Management and project leader must track the project and if necessary correct its course. Also the team itself does checks by inspections etc.. These checks are difficult to manage and need a lot of "team hygiene". This must be learned.

Comunication Rules

How does communication works ? Every information we get from our senses are filtered subconsciously and additionally changed. We add our interpretations, prejudices, expectations and experiences. Often if we do not like somebody this person might tell what he/she wants. There are few chances that we react friendly. Additionally long trained behaviors get control before we get aware of our reactions. F.e. if somebody speaks in an unfriendly manner to us we become automatically aggressive, sad or anxious. Very often we even do not recognize these automatism's and react unfriendly without knowing it. Our words can be friendly. But the manner how we say them can be unfriendly. This undertone is much more recognized by the receiver of our message than by us.

Everybody has its own experiences and behaviour structures and therefore everybody has her/his own filter. Normally it is easy to accept information related to things we already know or we are interested in. Positive feedback (all information we mark to be positive) is also easy for us to accept. Normally people have more difficulties to repeat information correctly they feel to be negative. Especially any negative feelings - they might already be there or be a consequence of the received information - block the acceptance of information. So the information is received incomplete and 'completed' by interpretations and expectations. As a result what we understand from a message might be very different from the information the sender wanted to give.

By the way on the sender side a similar filter is working. With every sentence we say we have expectations, a reason why to say it and often a lot of presumed information in our head we do not tell. So there is a wide field of misunderstanding possible.

There are no recipes for avoiding such misunderstandings and it takes a long training to avoid them. We can first try to understand the mechanisms of our own 'filter' by carefully watching us and our emotions and reactions. After a while we will recognize perhaps some unpleasant properties of ourselves. When we recognized and accepted them we can start to find the reasons. F.e. I became angry - but what was hurt in myself? By this e learn more and more to differentiate between emotions and wishes we have and the one others have. In a next step we can try to accept that others have such a filter too which might soften our automatic reactions and give us more humor in dealing with others.

The following rules describe an ideal case which is very difficult to achieve and perhaps never exist in reality. But they give us a hint where communication processes do not work correctly.

Basic rules for meetings and talks

• Try to assure that the receiver of your message is ready to receive it (does not typing on her/his keyboard, is not impatient or angry,... ) .
• Only one person is speaking - all others are listening. Listening means listening with awareness not disturbed by aggression, impatience or any parallel activity.
• Speak about yourself. F.e do not say: 'We need a break.' But: 'I am tired - I need a break.' As a general rule try to differentiate carefully between your interests, expectations and emotions and the one of others.
• Avoid any assumptions about the feelings or reasons others may have. Example: 'Why are you sad? ' The other person might only be tired.
• A 'Why' question might provoke reactions evading the point. Example: 'Why don't you discuss the matter?' 'Because it is boring.' A better strategy might be: 'The matter is important for me because ..... . How does it affect your business?' 'I also have problems in this area but in my department it is caused by ....'.
• Speak about feelings - but without attack.
• Avoid 'side talks' in meetings. They are a sign of a disturbed group. A member might be bored, frustrated or afraid of speaking openly.
• Any disturbance has priority because it blocks communication paths. Such disturbances might be: aggressions, no fresh air in the meeting room, impatience, ....
• Try to practice active listening.

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