The Retrospector

This post is the next installment of the 5 Steps to Help Your IT Team Concentrate series. The overview of all the steps I intend to cover in this series is listed for you here, with links to the previous posts, 0 being the 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 third step:

3. Encourage collaboration in the group time, and support total isolation for the individual time.

In the last section, I emphasized creating a process that works for all types of employees. The focus of this post is to reiterate and emphasize the importance of what should be happening in the group and individual times allocated.

• Group Time

Assuming you’ve found the balanced process that works best for you, or at least have found one that you’re going to try out for now…it is very important that you encourage total collaboration during the group times allocated. During the group sessions you want to get the full advantage of having everyone in one place while everyone is in ONE PLACE. You don’t want to have to readdress the same issues later on because you didn’t fully cover everything, which could totally take someone else out of their “zone” later on by trying to gather up everyone again.

During the group sessions you want to:

1. Make sure everyone has a clear direction of what’s to be accomplished while in the group.
2. Make sure everyone has a clear direction of what’s to be accomplished before the next gathering.
3. Encourage input from every member without ridicule to keep the fresh ideas and variety of possibilities on the table…yet narrow the focus before the conversation is over.
4. Keep the energy and motivation as high as possible.
5. Identify dependencies on each member if they exist, followed by action plans of those involved to make sure things fit together nicely.

I’m sure there’s more to do in group meetings to make them effective. I’m not trying to list the all-encompassing group session agenda. I’m hoping to identify what will help your group sessions really act like group sessions so that you can also allow your employees to focus without interruption when it’s time for them to work alone.

• Isolated Time

This is the part of the entire series that I had intended for a single post. As much as I attempted to contain it within a post of it’s own, the other topics continued to jump out at me in more and more detail until they too were detailed enough to merrit posts. After all is said and done though, the initial thoughts have now been spread throughout the entire series leaving this particular part in its content-lacking state.

At any rate, the most important part of this series is finding ways to help your IT folks concentrate. The majority of IT people I’ve worked with concentrate FAR better in isolation than in a group. Some people may be more productive in groups, but concentration is definitely better when running solo. So how can you help your people perform better when they’re all alone?

Well, here’s a list that may help:

1. Give each employee their own space. That’s right, don’t make your programmers all sit at one big long banquet table in single room. Allow them to at least sit at their station without breathing down the next person’s neck. Especially don’t sit people across from each other without some kind of barrier in between even if it’s not sound-proof.
2. Reduce walk-ins as much as possible. Give them a door they can close once in awhile. If that’s not an option, headphones, cube signs saying “Currently IN THE ZONE, Do Not Disturb”, or a community “quiet room” where people can take their work with them and know they won’t be disturbed.
3. Reduce electronic interruptions. Encourage them to turn off phones, put chat and mail programs in another virtual screen or computer out of view. Some people have the ability to multitask really well, and their job may depend on their ability to focus on 10 things at once…but most employees I’ve seen do much better when they’re able to complete one task in the queue and move on to the next.
4. Make sure they are totally aware of the expectations, and that they’re equipped with the knowledge and tools required to meet their goals. There’s nothing more frustrating than having to wait on a reeeeaally slow-ass computer to compile your code when all you want to do is check that little conditional you changed. Minds wander when there’s nothing to do but wait. This also implies that your employee is trained enough to handle the job given. If they can’t handle the job, they’re probably more worried about what will happen if they can’t finish it than finding out how they could try delivering something.These are the main points, though I’m sure there’s some really good stuff you could add to it. So what else can you think of that would help in either environment?

The next post will conclude the series on helping your IT employees concentrate by talking about creating atmosphere and adopting change.

Tags: concentration, productivity, focus, IT, 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

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 first step:

1. Identify how your employees concentrate and perform

It is very important to identify how your members are able to concentrate and perform their best in the first place. Being able to concentrate isn’t something you can just tell someone to do. It’s a trait that is different for all kinds of people.

I’ve simply never seen a group of people where everyone was able to concentrate with the same environment. Some like it quiet, some like it loud. Some like it bright, some like it dark. It would be great to have a team full of productivity chamelions, but the truth of the matter is…team dynamics generally implies figuring out how to get the team to work together without expecting much change on the part of the individual team members.

Start with the basics

In order to identify how they concentrate and perform, you need to let them try some things on their own. When getting a feel for a team member, make sure you spend enough time to let them understand what is needed. Then let them loose and see what happens.

Pay attention to everything that happens as they prepare to dive into the project. During implementation, how much interactivity was there? How many distractions did the employee encounter? How often did their eyes wander around the room with a look of boredom? These are key questions to ask when diagnosing what type of environment would be best for a person on your team.

Interactivity

Some people work best when collaborating with others. They like to bounce ideas off of others and feed of other member’s creativity and enthusiasm. Synergy is the corporate term for this phenomenon. I actually prefer this in limited quantities, but if it brings the best out of your employee in long spurts you should definitely note it.

Distractions

I don’t know many people that are able to concentrate through many distractions. However, I’ve witnessed a few multitasking powerhouses too. This almost fits in with the synergy point above because many of the distractions are from other members of the team via chat or phone.

What I want to include on this is people that can interrupt that aren’t related to the project. Noises, music, flickering lights, or a lack thereof can all play a part too. Uncomfortable furniture can really distract someone enough to not focus too. Pay attention to anything that catches their attention too often and too easily.

Boredom

One of the ultimate issues with getting someone to really dig their feet in to concentrate on a task is how interested they are in it. In a state of heightened senses, the athlete that’s “in the zone” can reach their goal far more easily than someone that’s out for a leisurely game just so they can think about other things for awhile. Try to fit appropriate work to each member of the team. Sure, every job has stuff you don’t want to do, but try to keep your people motivated so they don’t let boredom get in the way of their concentration.

Make the work interesting! Managers do cheezy things all the time to get people excited about a bunch of crappy work that nobody wants to do. Give incentives outside the norm to get their minds off how boring the work is and how exciting it will be to get it finished.

Bottom line is, take notice of what the team member perks up about. Get a feel for what their interests are and try to make things easier to concentrate on by taking advantage of their interest level.

All these factors are good ways to get a feel for how someone prefers to get “in the zone” when on a project. Is there some other method you use to discover your employees concentration catalysts? How do you get a feel for a new employee on the team?

The next post in this series will discuss creating an entire process where your team members can be most effective. Continue on to Part III.

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

I stumbled onto an article the other day from The Chief Happiness Officer blog about the effects of starting a meeting off with a positive round. This sure triggered some memories about countless tips on project management I’ve gathered in the past, but my first reaction was that this applies to more than just meetings. Granted, it’s most applicable in a meeting environment, but I think that conference calls, emails, even the occasional self-reflection is better off when you’re able to think of something positive first before heading into a full analysis.

Effective meeting structure

I don’t want to sound like I’m advising you to misrepresent anything. By all means be totally honest with everyone about things. However, the structure in your delivery can really have a positive or negative impact on your message as a whole.

At one of the first companies I worked for, I noticed right away that there was a pattern for meetings and for most any form of communcation to a group:

1. Start with a summary of what the discussion is about.
2. Point out something positive.
3. Describe the overall goals and objectives.
4. Recap the direction and action items, if any.
5. Motivate as much as possible during the recap.
6. Thank everyone.

The part that stuck out here was the point out something positive. With any project, something is happening. It’s really not hard to find a positive to point out and give credit for in group projects unless you’re just in a really shitty project with a total set of losers for a team. If that happens, at least try to highlight something good that you’re going to do.

Having felt a sense of accomplishment and recognition is highly motivating. One of the points I’ve made in a previous article about motivating geeks elaborates more on why this is a crucial step in keeeping motivation in the group. Starting off with postive points in a meeting is a great opportunity to give that recognition in there where it’s deserved before diving deep into controversial materal for the rest of the discussion.

May as well make the best of the unavoidable

I really hate meetings. They are, however, a necessary evil sometimes to keep effective collaboration amongst a group. The one-man-show should have no trouble with just communicating status upward because all the other coordination is simply happening in his mind. Having others to work with complicates things because if there’s communication barriers mistakes work their way into flawed designs or implementations.

So, if you have to sit through or coordinate meetings every week. I would say a good idea is definitely to start off as Alex mentioned in the link above, with a positive point that can set the pace of the conversation for your entire encounter be it a group meeting, call, or email.

What ideas do you have to put a nice positive spin on things before you get started? Do your meetings ever start out with a totally negative feel where you just get totally torn between wanting to work somewhere else and digging in your heels? Maybe putting the positive note somewhere else in the meeting structure has worked well for you. Share some insight, I’m interested in what you have discovered.

Tags: communication, meeting, positive+influence, collaboration