Company and Teams: Goals and Methods

First version ~ 2010-03

The Company

From the things I've the privilege to enjoy in the past, together with
things I've missed, I can say that:

• Knowledge and experience are very valuable:
  
  • I expect the company I work for to have mechanisms of long term memory, to remember how to act in situations similar to others in the past.
    
  • The company frequently reserves time for reflection and feedback, as memory without retrospective consideration is useless.
    
  • At the same time, we use that memory and reflection to forecast the future and be prepared for a wide range of possibilities.
    
  • All that is also used for training: new staff must efficiently learn what's necessary to work in this place.
    

• Knowing where to go:
  
  • The company is oriented to solve real problems, and happy to do so.
    
  • It should therefore not have a unique view of how things should be, but must try to understand how things really are, and how quickly they change.
    
  • This implies that we should know and value both what we want, and what the customer wants.
    
  • Like this, the company and its teams must establish clear goals, on the long and short terms.
    
  • Priorities must also be correspondingly established for the short term, and teams should go through them with focus.
    

• More general principles:
  
  • The company values and promotes team work over isolation.
    
  • The company leaves room for creativity and group self-organization.
    
  • It values people (customers and workers) over concepts.
    
  • It appreciates sustainability, transparency, clarity, simplicity, honesty.
    
  • The company has a mentality of permanence
    

As I see it, following all these principles has the following benefits, among others:

• To speed up and simplify tasks that show up frequently. We accept that repetitive tasks exist, but we try to solve them quickly and efficiently so that we can focus our efforts in new challenges. Smart people need challenges.
  
• To promote efficiency in general, also in new, unexplored fields: we can do more with less effort.
  
• To reduce reaction time when the unexpected comes
  
• To make people more committed to their jobs.
  
• Transparency and clarity imply to let everyone inside the company, in an organized way, be informed of what is being done, so that in principle ideas and interactions can come from any side: new perspectives are useful.
  

Notes on 2012-04-11

The Team

Some practical guidelines for teams:

• the sign of a good team beginning to jell is that the members try to distinguish their team by adopting higher working standards
  
• extended overtime can break jelled teams and is a productivity killer on the long term
  
• inside a well-knit team you can see a lot of peer-coaching - for them it is not coaching it is just work
  
• internal competition makes coaching impossible
  
• teams need to get into the habit of succeeding together and linking it
  
• make a cult of quality
  
• build a sense of eliteness
  
• allow and encourage heterogeneity
  
• provide strategical but not tactical direction: managers are not part of the teams - teams are made up of peers, equals that function as equals
  
• in best teams different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. no one is the permanent leader, because that person would cease to be a peer and the team will break down.
  
• the structure of a team is a network, not a hierarchy
  
• nobody talks about quality reduced products, but about cost-reduced products usual method: less quality for earlier, cheaper product. It destroys developers' self-esteem
  
• the purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment
  
• good hiring is vital. The procedure should be extensive, everyone should get to know the applicant, and vice versa. Applicants should be filtered technically but also socially. Communication skills are mandatory for any position in a team.
  
• you can't be loyal to an organization which looks at its people as dispensable parts
  
• when someone needs skills to make a change, the company provides those skills
  
• The state of flow is a must for engineers, designer, writers, developers. In order to attain the state of flow, one needs about 15 minutes
  
• the manager's function is not no make people work, but to make it possible for people to work
  
• developers should spend more time thinking about how to do their task better and less time to implement it
  

• People work better in natural light / windowed space
  
• People don't want to work in a perfectly uniform space
  
• People hate changes, it's a fact. Changing things is an art of it own, and should be done strategically.
  

---

Notes on 2014-11-20

• I think that "a strategy" should contain a framework based on which we take decissions.
  
• I understand changing targets, as long as we have that framework for changing them.
  
• A framework can be a collection of rules, but that is boring. It can also be "a culture":https://medium.com/@bchesky/dont-fuck-up-the-culture-597cde9ee9d4, more fuzzy but more organic.
  
• Ideas for a culture:
  
  • We get to know our culture.
    
  • Priorities can change in the long term. Therefore, we shoudn't make efforts to nail them. Rough estimations are fine.
    
  • Priorities should be fixed in the mid term. Therefore, we make efforts to nail them accurately. Rough estimations are bad.
    
  • Decisions can not impose working periods longer than three weeks.
    
  • Creativity time should be framed. Once decissions are taken, we stick to them until final evaluation time. That means saying "No" sometimes, to some things.
    
  • Accepting too many changes can be bad for productivity. That means saying "No" sometimes, to some things.
    
  • Exceptions exist, but they are exceptional. That means they should happen less than 30 % of the time.
    
  • Planning and evaluating is a continuous process.
    
  • It should not interfere with development.
    
  • Fooling the customers is bad, it is better to avoid a question.
    
  • Fooling ourselves is very bad, and it is never good to avoid a question.
    
  • Customer and prospect communications should be consistent, and support the company strategies.
    
  • We should not make promises with deadlines beyond six weeks, as we know priorities will change unpredictably.
    
  • We should not create expectations if we cannot be sure we will live up to them.
    

EditThis! (edited 2014-11-20 15:28) [info] [diff] ♦ Print [help]
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