Anna Filina

The idea of self-directed teams is not new. It has been used for decades. Why would anyone want this? Does this work for everyone? How is it implemented? Is the traditional hierarchical model bad?

Hierarchical model

The desire to have self-directed teams come from various frustrations that the traditional model generates. Employees do not like to be micro-managed. If they see a more efficient or pleasant way to accomplish the exact same result, they do not want a supervisor to tell them that it’s wrong and that they should do exactly as they’re told. The traditional model breaks a process down into individual steps and assigns isolated tasks to team members, preventing any sense of accomplishment. This creates silos, repetitiveness and boredom. As a consequence, motivation goes down along with efficiency and loyalty. This in turn infuriates the management that seeks to increase control even further. But that cycle can be broken.

Self-directed model

This model has both advantages and disadvantages. Because the team no longer has somebody managing them each day, members have freedom of methodology as long as they can deliver the promised results. They can now organize their own time. This means more empowerment and motivation. Management not only benefits from increased efficiency, but also the team can now solve its own problems without exterior involvement.

On the other hand, these teams are hard to establish. Team members require a strong commitment to the company or this will not work. You will also have to invest in initial and ongoing training. Team members will have to learn management, decision making and problem solving skills. They must also understand the job of other members. Not everybody has the capacity or experience to make tough decisions. Not everybody can have a business perspective. Not everybody is willing to be held accountable for results or mistakes. Conflict resolution can be difficult in such teams and it is important to have exterior support in such situations.

The best of both

Interdependence and accountability are characteristics that are shared with light teams, also called agile. But these teams are not necessarily self-directed. In reality, the problems in all teams arise from applying any model without applying common sense. You want your people to be motivated and efficient? That’s easy.

They have to be result-driven. As a project manager, stop worrying about methodology, control or silly timesheets. Focus on results. You can’t ask your people to be pragmatic if you are not, and if you’re watching and judging their every step. Make sure that everyone understands the job of other team members and report to each other rather than reporting only to you. Don’t split tasks with strict boundaries because you want interdependence and accountability to flourish. Above all, apply your common sense rather than following a work methodology religiously. See what works best for your team and build on these strengths.

This presentation was recorded at the Montreal.rb user group. I gave a number of tips to investigate the performance of database queries and to speed them up.

When developers are not motivated, progress is slow and quality is low. This ultimately affects company revenues and can lead to reduced opportunities for all employees. Motivation leads in the opposite direction: wealth and happiness. The first thing to understand about motivation is that it’s internal. We can’t force someone to become motivated, but we can still have a strong influence. Here are my top three picks to increase motivation from my presentation at IPC 2013 in Berlin.

Goals

Motivation is our reason to act towards a goal. There are two common ways to express that reason. We can say that we will go to work because it’s 8am or in order to finish building a game that improves the logic of pre-school kids. The first one is reactive. Someone or something else is in control of our life, and it’s unpleasant. The second justification has purpose. When we identify ourselves with that purpose, you can feel pride and pleasure from your work. Great quality and productivity naturally ensue.

Small wins

A goal may seem far away and if we can’t achieve it quickly, we lose interest. The idea is to cut our work into smaller pieces. To become a Karate grandmaster takes much time, but getting a new belt shows progress and gives a sense of achievement. Software is similar. We can stabilize our code for demos more often. It’s not as fast as a straight path, but remember that we’ll stay in the game longer if we can see tangible progress rather than abstract percentages.

Use of talent

No developer enjoys doing repetitive tasks and staying in one place. Developers want to use their full range of talents as much as possible and gain new talents. Don’t give tasks too difficult for one’s skills, but just difficult enough to provide a challenge. Another way that we can help them improve is by sending them to conferences and workshops. Not only will the come back more motivated, but will also have increased productivity from all the new techniques that they learned!

Many developers claim that to achieve high quality software, developers must create automated tests that ensure that all possible execution routes have been covered. This is also known as full path coverage. I will argue that different types of software require different testing approaches and that full path coverage is impractical in almost every case. Too many tests simply create clutter. Read more…

A montreal-based newspaper recently released a new mobile product to read news. It’s very nice, but it cost them 40 million and took 3 years to ship, with some 100 people on the team. My company has enough experience with news corporations and other industries to know that there was a lot of waste. My associate stated on social media that he could save them millions on their next project. It’s what we specialize in: generating millions in ROI for our clients.

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