» 5 Steps To Help Your IT Team Concentrate Part III >> The Retrospector

5 Steps To Help Your IT Team Concentrate Part III

Posted August 14th, 2006
Categories: Corporate Life, Planning, Project Management, Team Building, Management

Today’s post is a continuation of the series for the 5 Steps To Help Your IT Team Concentrate. The full list of steps is recapped for you here, with a link to the previous posts in the series (step 0 being more of an introduction):

0. Coin a cool term for being fully concentrated
1. Identify how your employees concentrate and perform
2. Create a process where team members are most effective
3. Encourage collaboration in the group time, and support total
isolation for the individual time.
4. Create the appropriate atmosphere.
5. Don’t be afraid to change and experiment.

Today we’ll elaborate more on the second step:

2. Create a process where team members are most effective

Not everyone on the team is going to work in the same mode of concentration, nor with the same collaboration habits. Some people are better off isolated from groups to be able to concenrate enough to finish large or complex tasks. Others are much faster at solving problems in a group environment where ideas bounce back and forth in a very multi-tasked manner.

Whatever type of team you have, make sure you identify the combination of collaboration and isolation that works for each individual. If you run strictly in one mode or the other, half your team could be ineffective most of the time.

An example

How I prefer things work in a team environment has a mixture of both environments in many iterations. I like to run projects large and small with some variation of this flow:
(Keep in mind, there’s always many other projects going on, and this example is for a pretty small project. So 1-2 days on a task just means sometime over the course of those days, not all day every day during that timeframe.)

Day 1:

Brainstorm Session (Group - short)
Brainstorm (Individual - day or so)

Day 3-4:

Rehash ideas, narrow direction (Group)
Initial design choices (Group)

Day 5-6:

Agree on design/implementation approach (Group)
Take tasks and split amongst team to work on (Individual/Pairs)

Day 10:

Group review to reiterate tasks/progress (Group)
Continue individual tasks (Individual/Pairs)

Day 14:

Integration Session (Group)
Release (Group)

Now, I’m not trying to define what a software lifecyle should be with this post. I’m attempting to focus on the team-dynamics of the workflow. A good mixture of group collaboration and individual focus time seems to have always worked best. If you can manage to schedule the group times to be short and often, the long stretches of individual time will be far more productive for some. Those that work better in groups should be paired up with someone else that works equally well with others.

The point
The idea is to come up with a scenario where you’re playing off of people’s strengths instead of assuming that some process driven by a company-adopted methodology will work for your team every time. If anything, take the company-adopted methodology and at least try to accomodate some changes to help leverage your individual team member’s strengths as you see it helpful.

Now I’ve discussed some of what you can do overall for the team. The next installment in this series will point out some of the more specific things you can do to help the individuals through whatever process you decide to adopt.

What processes have you experimented with? How many variations have you tried and hated? I imagine most of you have some combination of group and isolated environments, but are there many successful with just using strictly one or the other? Let me know your findings…

Continue on to Part IV.

Tags: concentration, productivity, focus, IT, team+building, management