Tag: team

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How to set up a high-performance team (part3 – onboarding)

So let’s assume all is arranged and your new team member will start within the next few days or weeks. Time to think ahead about onboarding.

Why is well organized onboarding so important?

Let’s just wait and see what needs to be done whenever that person shows up. It’s amazing how many new employees need to wait for days and weeks for equipment and access rights until they can finally really start. What a waste of time, what a frustrating experience – something that just does not happen in a well managed team. So you’ll think in advance about your new team members equipment. You have a notebook already in the shelf or it’s agreed that he/she brings his own along? Good. Otherwise: get one ahead of time, you want to have it ready on day 1 and delivery may take some time. The team is informed and ready to welcome the additional help ? Of course you have thought about a desk and other basic stuff that may be relevant – like entries in your company directory, access rights to your systems, ID cards, and so on? You need to organize all that anyway, do it up front and provide a smooth and positive start.

Planning for knowledge ramp-up

In addition to these practical things you need to organize the knowledge ramp-up. Sit with your team and create a list of topics that the new team member will need to know or learn. Prioritize it. For each topic note the source of information. It may be yourself, one of the team members, or a link to a team Wiki page – or set up an ‘onboarding’ Wiki page for later re-use. Make sure that the team has thought about some first entry-level task that can be tackled along or after the initial topics to start team integration and interaction. Think back about your first day in a new office, a new team – it feels good if you feel welcomed, people have been waiting for you and you most likely made the right choice when choosing this position.

You may want to use this Onboarding checklist  to plan for this.

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How to set up a high-performance team (part2 – the job interview)

So let’s assume you have published your job offering. What are the next steps to get your dream team together?

If after a few days nobody has contacted you it may be time to re-visit your job offering. Is it clear enough? Are normal human beings able to fulfill your requirements or are you looking for superman? Have you checked if a quick Google search brings up your offering? Put yourself in the shoes of the great people you are looking for – would you find that job, and would you apply for it?

(5) Select job interview candidates 

Let’s assume the first candidates have submitted their CV‘s. Scan them. Does your candidate fit to your job description and profile? Skip the section with the list of skills – everybody can write up such lists. Instead look for former positions where the skills you are looking for have been learned or used. If you look at somebody fresh from college the combination of courses may reveal areas of interest. You want people in your team that are interested in what they are doing – this is where they will achieve remarkable results. Don’t be afraid to hire people that are better than you. You want a team of A-players where the combination of expert skills is more that the sum of the individuals.

There may be also a cover letter. What you want to see in a cover letter is that the person is able to connect his or her CV to your job offering. However if writing skills are not on the very top of your priority list let’s not be overly strict. In general don’t overrate documents – never take a decision based on this information alone. Use it rather to filter out people that don’t seem to fit at all, and use them as starting point for the next step. So invite whoever passes this first scan… If it’s a development position ask your candidate to bring some sample source code to talk about. If it’s a technical writer ask for some sample documentation – whatever is uncritical from IP perspective.

(6) What to asks during the job interview

So here you are, sitting at a table with your candidate if any possible. Skype interviews are only the second best option, without the person-to-person contact you will miss a lot of information. Bring in another colleague or someone from HR to get a second opinion later on. Make sure that there is enough time planned without external disturbance, you’ll probably need 1…2 hours. Don’t forget that the candidate is as much deciding for you as you are deciding for him/her. Lead the conversation, explain what your company is doing, explain the job and how that fits together. This should only take a few minutes. Find out what your candidate knows about your company – the A players will have looked up your website and other available information.

Then let your candidate talk. Listen. Ask questions, get into a conversation. The CV is your guiding line, try to understand the history of that person in front of you. You may ask for achievements your candidate is proud of and the related success factors. Or ask about major challenges in former positions and learnings out of them. Make sure to get at least a few proof points related to the skills that person claims to have. Look at whatever your candidate brought along and have a focused discussion around that. Don’t forget that good conversation skills are not the only thing you are looking for. This is why finding the right people is so hard. Try to get a feeling for how that person would do his job and how he/she would integrate within your existing team. Take notes, ask for questions. Make sure your candidate gets an impression about what’s going on within your local company setup.

(7) Post interview reflection

After the interview ask yourself if this person – to be more precise: this persons’ personality would fit into your team. Discuss it with colleagues. Only if you are comfortable at that level think about the skill set and experience and how it matches up with your profile. You may need a second interview. Follow your head, follow your gut feeling. Talent my be more valuable than some specific piece of knowledge. Knowledge and experience can be acquired over time, talent not. If you are not sure it may be better to continue searching. Wrong people decisions will have a very negative impact on your team, and they are difficult and lengthy to correct. However if you have interviewed several candidates and none of them seems to fit your standards may be unrealistically high.

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How to set up a high-performance team (part1 – roles and skills)

Creating software is all about people. Yes, you need tools and a strategy and so on – but the people you work with define the baseline from where you are starting and how fast you can go.

The level of creativity, experience, motivation in your team is the result of the personality mix of your people. Good leadership will build on that and make the team stronger over time, and this blog is much about how to do this. However the team’s limits as well as its unlocked potential are to a large degree defined by who is part of the group. So choose your setup wisely if you can. In case you are not flexible and don’t have any choice: stop reading here and focus on the many other topics that can help to optimize whatever team you have.

When I had to hire people for the first time and did some reading on the topic I found this frightening statement :

”…only 20 to 30% of all hirings are considered successful after the first 6 months by both parties”

Huh – if this is true and only 3 out of my 10 new hirings are ok I’m set up for trouble. It means sooner or later I’ll have to spend once more time on finding and training new people all over again. And most likely my project won’t run as successful as it could. In the end all went well but this statement (may it be true or not) motivated me to spend the time and effort required to find the right people. What does that mean?

Think about your dream team setup

First of all think about what you need. Imagine your dream team setup as tangible and concrete as possible. Hint: you are not looking for “5 good developers”. Each team will have some role split, be it on purpose or not. Compare that to a football team. Each player can run and hit the ball, hopefully. But great teams will have an ‘expert’ gate keeper and another guy up front who’s specialized at scoring goals. Have you ever seen a world class team where everybody is doing everything? It seldom happens. Humans tend to be particularly good at certain things and less good at others, this is just how it is. Accept it and work with, at least as a starting point. If over time the team members broaden their scope and work at peak level in various areas this is great and an amazing work experience. Just don’t count on this to happen from day one.

Rather think about what expert skills you need. This may be someone good at front-end or UX, or someone with back-end development experience. Or architecture. Or requirements management… If your team is small some skills may need to be combined to a single role, which will make it a bit more difficult to find the perfect candidate. If it is larger you may have several positions with same or similar skills. Then for each position take a sheet of paper (or use the template from the download section) and follow these steps:

(1) Write down team roles

write down what the person will do within the team. What are the responsibilities and goals? What will make up the usual work day? This is one of the most important steps in your team setup process and lays the ground for whatever comes next. Note that you don’t start by drafting a hiring offer. You are not writing down what skills or experience you are looking for. This comes later. Don’t take the shortcut. Invest the time and think about the position as such. Remember, your team members are one of the most important success factors and you need to get this right. Do this for each position you need, on a separate sheet. Write down the number of open positions on each sheet.

(2) Look at all roles in context

Put all sheets next to each other and look at them in context. Do they match up? Is everything covered to set up a working team? Talk it over with colleagues. Sleep over it and check again a day later.

(3) Define skillsets per role

Now think about the required skills for each of the positions. What will that person need to know in order to be successful? Try to find a balance between being to general (“needs programming experience”) and being too specific (“must know AwsomeLibrary V2.3 because this is what we plan to use”). This will go into your job offering description. It’s important that whoever reads it gets a good idea of what the position is about. You want to attract the talents – make sure to put in whatever makes your position interesting. Note down the desired experience level for the major areas. If certain skills are good to have but not absolutely required note that, too.

(4) The final touches for your job offering

Add a general overview about your company, your setup and why it is fun to work with you. Then get your job offering published on the platform of your choice. If you are looking for contracted resources for a limited time period there are freelancer project portals. Or companies specialized in hiring out. Or if you work for a larger company you’ll anyway involve HR and they’ll place the job offering for you.

Permanent hiring or contracting?

How about permanent hiring vs. contracting? You may wonder why there was no differentiation so far. Isn’t offering somebody a permanent employment totally different from contracting for 6 months? Well, yes and no. In 6 months (or whenever your contract ends) it will feel very very different. And filling a permanent job position may take some extra lead time. Otherwise – for your team it will feel very similar. There will be a new person that needs to be onboarded, go through the ramp-up phase, go through the team norming and storming phases until finally the first tangible results show up. You don’t want to go through this more often than required, so choose your team members wisely.

When will you try to hire permanently? In today’s volatile world companies are more and more reluctant to engage in long term. Not good, but this is often how it is. So you may not be allowed to hire anyway. If you have a choice think about this: your software will most likely never be ‘done’ once and for all. Whatever software is used in real business life will need at least some maintenance, and new requirements will come up sure as day follows night. Each person leaving takes knowledge away from the team and reduces the team performance. New people will need to go through the learning curve again. It takes teams usually several months in stable setup to reach peak performance. Whenever possible you should go for permanent jobs, unless you have a project with definite end date at hand or need very special skills over a short time period. Today ‘permanent’ does anyway not mean ‘forever’ any more.

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