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Building a Better Development Team?
mlawmlaw asks: "I'm part of a development team that provides internal applications for a large pharmaceutical company. The team consists of about a dozen members, some coders, some application developers, and some vendor managers. About twice a year we do some sort of group exercise that almost always focuses on team building. After doing this for the past few years, we have found that while we have built a team that works well together, we have missed the boat when it comes to developing other team skills. We need to focus on better ways of identifying and solving technical problems and developing stronger critical thinking skills. But how do we do this? Teambuilding was easy, bring the team together and do exercises in trust, recognizing diversity, and discovering your teammate's backgrounds. So I am asking the Slashdot community, what have you found to be effective in building a better team other than exercises in teamwork?"
Roleplaying will do this well. Contrary to Hollywood's portrayal, it's not a game for those unable to cope with this reality. It's a game for people who like analytical challenges. Among it's many team building advantages, is the revealing, to a group of people, how each of them solves problems. It exposes weaknesses in people's analytical thinking, and allows people who don't have the "right" answers to sit back and watch how those who do came to them.
It doesn't have to be AD&D either. Among many other varieties, the Science Fiction role playing games are very appealing to geeks and don't have nearly the "I'm a disconsolate teenager" stereotype attached. Nothing says "That was a bad analysis," better than a decision that everybody "buys into," that consequently gets all their characters killed.
If your group of people can't be persuaded to go this route, then an alternate that I experienced was to get the team involved in a team member's hobby. In trying to trick out a friend's car with a Linux-based, head-up-displayed engine monitoring system, I learned to observed the things that stalled that project in my work projects all the faster. Now my planning phase for a new project involves more thorough research into hardware suitability, than it did previously. I learned this "the hard way," but on a project that didn't affect my income.
one other suggestion I would throw in: It might help to rotate the members around a bit with different job assignments. For example, One person might work on fixing bugs, the other on adding features; flip the rolls, and have the two talk with each other about their processes in the job function and see if they learn from each other.
and most importantly, do the bar thing. it sees that thursdays works out best for people. you can all swap previous work condition stories. like "I remember when we had this one programmer who would store ALL OF THE USER'S DATA INCLUDING THEIR CREDIT CARD NUMBER in an unencrypted cookie, and my supervisor wouldn't fire him because he owned (as in responsible) the code for the registration."
=)
You could try running one of those courses I guess.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"I'm not sure what you're asking, but if you are trying to come up with a team activity that would help them think hard, my favorite is "Puzzle Day". I've done it a few times, and I come off of it with the biggest high and a new confidence in my abilities to solve tough problems, as well as a respect for the abilities of my friends & co-workers.
My teams were 10 to 15 people, but two teams of 5 or 6 would probably work. Come up with some fun but HARD problems. Hard means that 5 people working for 12 hours might solve 5 out of 10 problems. Try to have a theme.
Puzzles come in all shapes and sizes. Cryptogram word-search puzzles are one example: take a word search puzzle, then replace all A's with G's, B's with T's, etc.
The best puzzles are layered: After solving the word search, the uncircled letters make up the phrase "fear of the great mole rat", and the final answer to the puzzle is "Zemmiphobia". Then all of the answers to all of the puzzles come together to solve one final puzzle...
Maybe this isn't your cup o' tea, but I sure found it fun...
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
erm, sorry, but that emotional Intelligence stuff is mostly bullshit, especially Goleman. He continuously misrepresents facts and his selection of empirical studies is highly biased. Fact is, in almost all cases people who do well at their job are satifisfied and happy, not the other way round. It's charming to believe it might be the other way round, to believe, that e.g. exam anxiety/worry is something that keeps people from getting good grades, but in fact, the anxiety is mostly caused by incompetence. Admittedly, the causalitites in Psychology are not what you expect from say Physics, but at least Goleman is simply a peddler of hope, not of facts.