Author: Sergey Bondarev

Developer Advocate & Project Manager

Team Sport like Football VS Software Development — approaches to reuse

Sergey BondarevLeave a comment

In a previous post, I’ve mentioned that:

  • Software Development is close to Team Sport due to similar goals and challenging environment.
  • Team Sport has a much longer history with countless instruments and approaches created
  • We can try to apply some of them nowadays to Software Development. In my previous post, I’ve started with Team Sport Values.

Let me here continue with other useful approaches to use or which are already used well in Software Development.

Select what you like and apply to get benefits =)

Side Note: the approaches below are applicable to multiple Team Sports, but to simplify understanding, I added links related to Football only. I think these links are pretty interesting to read, especially for people who don’t have a lot of knowledge about how sport is organized.

  1. Teams as a key value and key producer of value. Formalized, pretty constant structure. Has its core of most professional leaders. I think treating not just employees, but the Team as key company value is a way of how to maximize value for the client and company. To support and a Team Manifesto for Software Development Companies.
  2. Team Managers who care about Team calendar/plan, performance, rotations, strategy & tactic, growth, budgets, generated value etc. I see it like a Project Manager with advanced focus on the Team. It can also be a coach.
  3. Team has Maturity defined by hierarchical Divisions & Leagues. Teams can grow their maturity and go upper to the next Division: it’s something like result-based career path not just for a single employee but for the whole Team.
  4. Farm team to make production-ready players from juniors, can be used also to pre-build production-ready team.
  5. Clubs as a standalone, winning Business Unit around the Team. The team is not the only who makes it win. The team is surrounded by structures to cover different aspects. It creates a Business Unit — a club with their economic, business, marketing, PeopleOps and more.
  6. Sport Schools deeply integrated with Sport Clubs to attract and select the best juniors. Clubs are usually sponsors of schools which attract young people, train them with basics, select the best ones and then involve in Farm team and so on. It has a big synergy inside because of using of the same coaches, marketing of the club etc.
  7. Drafts of players. The Team Leaderships gather to select transparently the best team members from the bench and juniors. The team and team manager are involved deeply in this process.
  8. Marketing around a team, like in Professional Sport. It can help with hiring directly in Team and Company at all.
  9. Unique Team Brand to recognize the team, and make the team proud to be a part of it. It includes name, logo, mascot, mission, values, merchandising etc. Team Brand Awareness Development is a big part of Sport Marketing.
  10. Naming and metaphors from Sport as a key to an efficient multicultural work environment. Sport ideas have a clear and simple message clear for different cultures around the globe. Naming and approaches taken from sport can simplify ideas in Software Development and make them clear for employees and the client.
  11. Psychologist for Team members and approaches from Sport Psychology. Sport and IT both has a lot of stress, and we need to demonstrate our best with keeping in mind our personal health. We can reuse it in Software Development, for sure.
  12. Public Communities of Team fans. I think it can be adopted to public or internal company communities.
  13. Coaches to set up and reach high standards. Coaches have a professional background in this sport and excellent skills in coaching. They don’t play on the ground with the team, but create a strategy and tactic for the team outside the game.
  14. Challenges with Prizes and Recognition across Teams (e.g., in Pre-Sales, Hackathons on project, etc.)
  15. Inspirational Achievement-based compensation and recognition. OKR, KPI can be used here.
  16. Support of Team Games and Sport in general across employees to promote sport culture.
  17. Referee / Judges which know well the game rules, can help with audit and set up of work processes, policies, and make Teams and Delivery follow them. It’s close to Auditors and Process Management. They can be internal or public.
  18. Recognition and Motivation of Records/Achievements. This can create an excellent marketing content.
  19. Transfer of players across teams as business. It already works well in Software Development.

You are welcome to advise more sports approaches which can be reused in Software Development.

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Principles for me & my team

Sergey BondarevLeave a comment

As a manager, I realized that it should be some guidelines or principles which can move me and my team to success. The book called Principles by Ray Dalio inspired me to start describing them in one place.

Why do I need it? I see several goals I want to cover by this:

  • Unite the team around similar values, which will move us to success.
  • Add clarity to my decisions and management style, and finally make them support me naturally
  • Increase team efficiency and success at all
  • Create an environment where the team can make right, consistent and autonomous decisions by themselves
  • Help to create a convenient, transparent and predictable environment where the team members can grow, feel inspired and finally reach success
  • Formalize my principles/approaches and finally make them management and extendable.
  • I can share it to my manager to be on the same page.

Here on this page, I would like to aggregate such principles and use it for future as one of my instruments.

As a key sources of principle I will use my experience and books such as a Principles of Ray Dalio mentioned above, Radical Candor by Kim Scott. They look to me as sensible keys to successful management, business, and work relationships. Furthermore, I want to use a grouping approach used by Ray Dalio and extend this list in the future.

Let’s begin.

Common Principles

  1. Iterative approach in all aspects of work. Small results matter. Results can be small, but delivered fast and regular.
  2. Stay focused. Work should be aligned with defined goals.
  3. The right idea wins. The idea based on sensible arguments, competency is more important than ideas based on employees’ status, personality, ego, authority etc.
  4. Make mistakes are OK on the way to finding the best solution. IT’S NOT OK to take NO action to avoid them for then next time.
  5. Each field of work should have an Owner who cares about it. If you create something, you become an Owner. The Owner is responsible for the result and the consequences it causes. Initiative without an Owner dies and, finally, brings no value. To start an initiative — as the Owner, you need to clarify the goals to be achieved, costs/investments, value it can finally bring, and how it can be measured.
  6. Work should have the ability to Invest & Grow & Get Fair Value from it. This is a motivation & compensation for the Owner’s efforts.
  7. Accumulate and Improve what can be reused. If you create something which can be reused — accumulate it in the right form and iteratively improve during usage. It will save time in the future, and make possible manage and get great quality,

Work Relationships

  1. WHO is over then WHAT. Relationships are a value you should care about. To build something valuable and complex with the help of colleagues, it’s critical to build productive and strong relationships with them. We need to care and grow our relationships to make more complex and valuables things.
  2. Relationships should be safe and transparent. We all should work to create the trustful and transparent environment where each can share ideas, get support or a provided an opposite vision. Use constructive feedback instead of pure criticism, I-message, stay polite, not rude. Don’t say bad words or critic about a person, without this person in the room.
  3. Relationships should be mature. Take ownership over your relationships with colleagues and try to resolve the issue with relationships directly with them before involvement of third parties.
  4. We are all humans and have not just rational, but also an irrational/emotional side. We also have not just work, but other areas of life. We accept the emotions of each other. Empathy and support of colleagues are valuable for us. The ability to share emotions without getting shame creates the ability to build complex solution and don’t accumulate negative experiences but detect issues and solve it.
  5. Be objective
  6. There’s no shame in not knowing something. No shame to ask for help. No shame to asking questions.
  7. Questions and suggestions are not critics. Please don’t hesitate to do it. Try not to use evaluation.
  8. If you criticize — suggest a solution, if you suggest a solution — be ready to help with it.
  9. Resolving issues with another department should go through department management.
  10. Team is a value we need to care about. That includes support of productive work relationships, team culture and values, team individuality. It’s constant with the Software Development Team Manifesto.
  11. The skill to act as a Team Player is essential for an employee.

Work Culture

  1. Bring the “best You” to work. Do all need to be productive at work: support work-life balance, care about your health, sleep well.
  2. Idea/message is more significant than how it looks.
  3. If you’re meeting’s owner/organizer — please have a plan, facilitate the meeting, follow the plan

Management Principles

Here I will collect principles specific for managers.

  1. Work you assign should be sensible
  2. Work you assign should be fairly paid based on the value it creates
  3. Care about Team Motivation. A motivated, result-oriented and professional Team can bring more value than just a professional Team or group of independent employees. It includes growing of each team member, knowing it motivators etc.
  4. Working in accordance to a sensible plan has more chances to be successfully completed.

Values

to support previous Principles

  1. Values to follow:
    > Goal-orientation
    > Teamwork
    > Excellence
    > Inspiration
  2. Values are strict for all team

Champions League VS Software Development – Values

Sergey Bondarev1 Comment

After the years, I’ve spent in Software Development, I’ve realized the following things:

  1. Complex and successful solutions are made by TEAMS, not by unique and independent people
  2. Software Development is NOT about Family but pretty close to Professional TEAM SPORT: both are high—competition business where talented teams are so important (not only because of this, but I will explain this vision in some other post)

Team Sport history has thousands of years. I’ve asked myself what we can take from this?

What about Values?

I think yes! I assume, it can give some ideas for Software Dev Teams and Companies which values should be promoted to become a leader.

Now the UEFA Champions League is running, so I decided that it will be pretty interesting to gather the Values of top, well-known football clubs with a long history.

Let’s begin.

Side note: I’ve added a link to their official webpage where values were mentioned.

FC Real Madrid

  1. Excellence 
  2. Winning Spirit
  3. Universality
  4. Solidarity 
  5. Humility 

FC Barcelona

  1. Humility
  2. Effort
  3. Ambition
  4. Respect
  5. Teamwork

FC Bayern Munchen

  1. Be Successful
  2. Be Inspiring
  3. Be Committed
  4. Dream Big

FC Borussia Dortmund

  1. Intensity
  2. Authenticity
  3. Cohesion
  4. Ambition

FC Liverpool 

  1. Dignity
  2. Ambition
  3. Unity
  4. Commitment

FC Arsenal

  1. Always move forward
  2. Be Together
  3. Actions that Matter

FC Atlético de Madrid

  1. Dignity
  2. Ambition
  3. Unity
  4. Commitment

Side note: I also understand that sometimes values mentioned in public resources are a part of marketing, but I assume that it still representative and describes the culture or a target for it. Especially for a company (clubs) with a long history.

After I’ve gathered it together, I see clearly that all these values-words of winning clubs can be divided by following groups:

  1. Achievement-orientation: includes values like Achievement, Be Successful, Winning Spirit, Ambition, Intensity etc.
  2. High Standards & Motivation: Inspiration, Excellence, Be Inspiring, Dream Big etc.
  3. Importance of Team & Personality:  Teamwork, Universality, Solidarity, Unity, Respect, Cohesion etc.
  4. High Personal Qualities: Dignity, Humility, Respect, Commitment, Be Committed, Sacrifice etc.

So now you can check if the values of Your company and Yourself are in these groups and aligned with the values of top football clubs 😉

Definitely, Software Development is close to sport but not the same, and not all of these values should be there. But still, it has some sense for me.

Based on this analysis, I’ve asked myself which values from this list can be taken for my ideal Software Development Company. My choice is the following (without priority):

  • Highest Value for Client (I have substituted Achievements to be closer to software development)— all our work should be transmitted into the highest value to the Client. It makes us win on the market.
  • Excellence—to bring the highest value, and win a great prize, you need to set up and reach high targets and follow high standards.
  • Teamwork — big wins are impossible without teamwork. Team players are valuable for us. Teamwork has trust, respect, friendship, cooperation, and unity behind.
  • Inspiration—it’s difficult to set up high goals and win if you are not inspired, not motivated.

Side note: It’s also existing a chance that non-top clubs/companies have the same values. My opinion is:

  • It depends on how these values really supported by the company, management and usual employees.
  • Good values, even if they are fully supported, are helpful, but not enough to win. It depends on the right people with the right ideas in the right place, financial aspects, competitors etc.
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Template for 1-1

Sergey BondarevLeave a comment

During my work as a manager, I’ve clearly realized the following facts:

  1. Know your employee as a human. We are not robots, but humans! To manage successfully, you need to know your employee not as a worker only, but human. You need to know their personal goals, motivators because it’s closely linked with your success.
  2. Help employees with their goals to reach yours. Connect them. The story of successful/not successful management is about how the goals of you and employee fit to each other. To manage employees, you have to help with their goals. To make your goals to be reached – link your goals with the goals of employees. It’s applicable for short and long-term goals.
  3. Bidirectional feedback makes work more efficient. It adds a self-improving mechanism to communication with employees, which also improves work efficiency, make it predictable. As a part of it creates convenient and less stressful work environment for all sides. Read the book “Radical Candor” for more explanations.
  4. Action, Action, Action! All the previous is excellent, but will not work if all of this will be not supported/transformed into actions which will be finally done and make all of these happen, no on words!

As an important instrument to cover all of these things is 1–1 Meetings with employees.

In this post, I want to share with you my insights and Template, which significantly increased the value of such meetings for me.

I heard many positive feedbacks from colleagues and finally decided to share it with the wider community.

Let’s start with few insights:

  1. 1-1 should be NOT mixed with status call with employee. It should be a separated meeting in time because it’s hard to change mind quickly: from work goals and tasks to personal goals and motivators, from reporting to communication as a partner etc.
  2. 1-1 should be regular and NOT be skipped. Sometimes for employees and managers, it looks like nothing to discuss. Usually, it’s a wrong feeling because of different factors. It can be because meetings are too frequent: I suggest doing it at least 1 per month, with frequency convenient for both sides: when they have something to discuss. It can also be because it’s hard to start with something: employee and manager have no points to start with, not clear what really can be discussed. In this case, my template below will be pretty helpful. Meetings should be regular because it should be never ending, iterative work on improvements.
  3. 1-1 will NOT work if no trust between employee and manager. 1-1 should be a place when sides talk more like a trusted partner: share feedback, goals, concerns, objections in both directions. If no trust – the value of 1-1 meeting is not clear it all. As a result, managers should prepare a trustful and safe environment for subordinates (see Radical Candor book for ideas how to do it).

I like to do 1-1 in face-to-face format with coffee in cozy place 😉

Finally, let me share the template which can be used to manage 1–1 meetings with exact employee.

It contains the following useful info separated by tabs:

  1. Possible Agenda of 1-1 step by step with possible timing
  2. Motivation Check where employees can easily identify and share their motivation in details
  3. Action Items log to keep them in mind and track their state
  4. Long-term Agreements contains important agreements which important to know and support on a long distance.
  5. Career Path high-level description
  6. 1-1 History & Feedback to store Manager<>Employee feedback and also motivation points – to see dynamic

Enjoy!

Great insights from Template: since you can measure the motivation of your employees, you can gather this information from your sub-managers (if any) and analyze their results. It increases visibility across your organization retention of employees, resolve their blockers quicker. I’ve created a matrix for all employees in the organization and tracked it on monthly basis.

Additionally, to these, you can create a repeatable checklist which be launched automatically before1-1 to be ready for both sides. It can be easily automated in checklist-based Process Management Tool checkflow.io. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you need help with it.

Side note: additionally, to my personal experience, it’s also based on:

  • A fantastic list of motivation factors and idea how to work with it was provided by the coach of Stratoplan management school.
  • Ideas from Radical Candor book by Kim Scott.
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How to increase the Presales success: Part 2 – Solutions

Sergey BondarevLeave a comment

In the past article, I’ve described challenges & issues I met in Presales.

Now I want to describe solutions which, I think, can help to solve them and increase the success of Presales.

Let’s go.

  1. Involvement of potential Teams & Managers. The Team and Manager which have a chance to implement the project should be involved in Presales as soon as possible. It should reduce the gap between Delivery and Presale with continuity of agreements, involved employees, accountability of team, reducing useless risks used for generic team. 
  2. Internal Presales Competition. Involvement of multiple Teams & Managers should be organized as competition by the Presales team (e.g., in the format of Hackathon). Results from all teams, should be combined into the proposal with the best options identified by different teams. The winner ideally should start the project and continue to be accountable for what was estimated. The winner also should be got a recognition/compensation as in competition.
  3. Presales-related Education of Senior Developers & Delivery Management & Sales.  They should be educated before request. If an employee goes on the Bench, it’s the best time to be trained for Pre Sale. Education should include: a) Estimation technics & practice. It’s the minimum. b) Solutions (including blueprints and bootstrappers) education. The goal of it to apply best practices and also make a better offer. c) Upsell technics & Practice. d) Cross-sell technics & Practice. Ideally, education should be continuing and started, not just on the bench. For this purpose, it should be LMS involved (like TalentLMS)
  4. Make the Price attractive. It should be an additional Process of Presale team to optimize and adopt Assumptions, Risks and prepare multiple pricing approaches based on customer profile and needs. It should stimulate Delivery to apply new practices to increase value, reduce price and time of development. Not only that, but it should be a strong collaboration of Presales with the R&D department which will manage Solutions, Blueprints, Bootstrappers and also Engineering who will.  Furthermore, it should also be a review and trying to apply 3rd party solutions which can reduce cost.
  5. Have at least 3 pricing options for ANY kind of request: it can be named Minimal (or Startup-like), Standard, Advanced. Each option should have pretty different price. Each proposed solution can be presented in different dimensions which are differently covered for options (e.g., Expendability, Reliability, Scalability, UX/UI, Rich Functionality, Duration, Price, Support costs, Env costs and more). The next step is to decide how dimensions are covered for different options (which output will be expected by the customer) and definitely it should impact on the price. Here it requires from Presales to think about totally different stack/platform. As a result, such options can be presented as a map to the client with pricing below and key facts/output/numbers for each dimension for each option. It’s natural, since close to what we see when selecting options for a car, compare products in store. You will be surprised after the client’s feedback: selected option are pretty different from their initial requirements!
  6. Motivation of Pre Sale team & experts to win. It should be done by Achievement-based bonuses/valuable gifts, significant recognition across the company and outside. They should feel themselves as heroes! Employees & Teams on the bench will be motivated by getting a new project.
  7. Competence Accumulation for quick find and reuse it for similar requests. It includes knowledge, solutions which is done in collaborations with other departments. It can be done by creation and support of such company storage) Teams Portfolio database b) Employees profile database c) Project Showcase Library d) RFI Q&A e) Solutions library f) Business & Tech Domain knowledge g) Useful Contacts (like external or internal experts in the area)  All of these I call Competence DB, which should be a part of company system.
  8. Product Mindset & Management in Presales. The Presales team should apply approaches from Product Management across Presales. The key goal is to bring maximum value and satisfaction to the customer in the context of proposal for the product they want.
  9. Accountability of Pre Sale until the project completion. The Presales team involved not just on Presale, but also responsible for transferring correct guidelines/vision/agreements/practices to the Delivery team. Result of the completed project should also take in account of Presales team performance review.
  10. Tracking of Market Demand based on incoming requests. That means that Presale should track Market needs and inform other departments (especially Delivery) about changes or needs. Pre Sales can be a driver of changes in Delivery.
  11. Increasing types of proposed Offerings. In general, Presales should support and increase offerings. Additionally, to standard offerings it can be Selling of Teams, Consulting, Audit etc. Definitely, the offering should be implemented by other Delivery.
  12. Deep collaboration with the Sales & Delivery department. It includes:> Presales Process should be transparent and confirmed for Sales and Delivery. Updates to the process should also be shared with them.> Education of Sales & Delivery Management is important (mentioned above)
  13. Iteratively improved Winning Process of Presales. It should generate less stress for participants, more wins at the end, lower efforts from the Presales team. It can be solved by creation of useful tools described above. Ideally, each middle/large request should be ended by retrospective and improvement action items in backlog, which should be managed on regular basis. As a part of it should be a careful accumulation, tracking regular review and improvement of Process results including: a) Pre Sale Success. Later I’ll share metric I suggest to use for Pre Sales b) Reject reasons. It’s important and should be carefully got from the customer with the help of Sales. c) For requests, we won: Project completion results VS our proposal. It should regularly connect with Delivery Management to track changes. e) Accumulation of empiric data in context of the exact employees and teams, f) Efforts spent on requests … and more.
  14. Quality of Artifacts. Our quality can be extended and more recognized by the customer if we will deliver more quality and flexible list of artifacts to describe our proposal and the advantages it brings. It can be POC, Attractive Visual materials etc. It can be done in deep collaboration with Marketing. As a result, all templates should be ready.
  15. Involvement of domain expertise to increase in proposal. In-depth knowledge of the domain and the ability to communicate in the same language with the customer gives as advantages in comparison to competitors. We should find a way how to involve domain expertise into proposal to bring bigger value to the customer and demonstrate our competence. Involvement of experts with specific domain knowledge is part of the solution (usually it’s close to the development area, not the domain itself). Another way is to involve external expert exactly from the domain.
  16. Efficient process for different classes of request. Process flow should be different for different classes of requests based on criteria: a) Perspective to win request, b) Customer profile. How valuable this customer for our portfolio. c) Size of the project, d) Urgency of request. It also requires classification approach together with Sales. Class of request should influence on deliverables provided by Pre Sales team, involvement of experts, approaches related to pricing approach. It should be the map which can help with decisions. Furthermore, an SLA for each class.
  17. Detailed team proposal. That means that Presales team should be focused not just on proposal functionality implementation but clarification of customer team requirements to make a better proposal / be able to form/find the right team. It should be done with the support of the PMO.
  18. Preparations Process to be ready for speaking in the same language with client. For clients/projects which can bring big value now or in the future, it makes sense to spend some time on preparation before first call: that means to be aware about pains for the market, domain knowledge in general etc. It will have a good effect if the team demonstrates expertise starting from the first session.
  19. Presales Automation. As far I see, the Presales process has a pretty similar flow for similar types of requests. Thus, flow can be automated by tools provided inside CRM which are pretty useful (for example as project templates in Pipedrive) or by a simple process automation tool like Checkflow.io. I also see the need to automate data gathering to measure/analyze/improve Presales process.
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How to increase the Presales success: Part 1 – Challenges

Sergey BondarevLeave a comment

One of the key goals of Presales in a Software Development Company is winning new clients together with Sales. It includes creation & enforcement of relationships with Client, making an attractive proposal which can be successfully completed with the resources of Delivery. 

I’ve spent a significant amount of time as Head of Presales teams in different companies, and also processed multiple requests as Presales Engineer by myself. In each role, I’ve worked to reach the goal and increase our success rate. For me, it was 12%, but I saw that it can be more.

In this post, I want to summarize challenges I met on my way and describe solutions I found, how Presales success can be increased (I’ll share them in a separate post).

Let’s start. I’ve decided to describe key challenges/causes as an answer to these questions:

  • Why do Clients decide to proceed with another competitor?
  • Why a Proposal we made was not doable, and a Client was finally dissatisfied? 

The list is not prioritized:

  • Big price. Price is usually estimated for a generic team including high risks to complete this project. Adding of any modern/unusual practices or less-qualified employees increased risks and price as well. Finally, it was pretty big for Client and not competitive with others. Lack of bootstrappers which can speed up/reduce price of development. Big price is typically not a root cause, but a consequence of causes described below. It’s the top of the iceberg.
  • Proposal with lack of options with different price ranges. If the proposal provides options in the same pricing ranges – it creates a dead end: the client should select one or none.
  • Subjectivism of Presales team. Typically, there are limited groups of employees involved in Pre Sale—it generates Proposal from one perspective and avoid entirely different approaches and dev stacks. It affects pricing for sure. Experience of company Delivery also limits the proposal and avoid out of the box thinking. This conservatism is understandable – it minimizes risks and related costs. It’s just an easier way then compare of these savings with benefits from applying of new stack and dev approaches.
  • Existing tech/domain experience was not applied well. Past experience was hard to find and reuse. Knowledge was just spread across the company.
  • Low value of Proposed solution. This is one of the biggest and hardest root problems to solve. To bring the highest value to the potential client, it should be a combination of understanding the business goals of the client, market landscape, product management skills. Sometimes, Proposal made by Delivery focused on experience concentrated inside the Delivery, without broader vision outside. Value is not about functionality and technical solution – it’s just a top of the iceberg.
  • Low motivation of Presales team and involved experts. The Presales process is pretty stressful and urgent. It is hard to find tech experts who can help with the request and be motivated to do all the best. Motivation by salary or overtimes was not working well. It should be something else.
  • Low capacity of Presales team and involved experts. Incoming requests overload presales teams since the Pre Sales process is not scalable. It has negative impact on quality and process duration.
  • Long duration of the process. The process is pretty long due to availability of experts and training of them during the request itself. 
  • Extra efforts spent on the low-priority requests. The process was not effective and didn’t correlate with real needs.
  • Gap between Sales and Presales.  To win Clients, Presales, and Sales should work as a single team which supports each other. Occasionally, it’s another story. Sales didn’t understand the proposal including options, added risks etc. As a result, it’s hard for him to make a right decision while working with a client. Different prioritization of requests creates misunderstanding. The Presales & Sales team was not spending time educating each other.  
  • Gap between Presales and Delivery. That means that the delivery team is typically not involved in Presales, since doesn’t exist at the moment when requests in processing. All agreements and architecture created during this work are difficult to transfer to the new team and especially implement it. It creates risks and creates inconvenience and dissatisfaction for the Client.
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Software Development Team Manifesto

Sergey Bondarev2 Comments

Why Manifesto was created

Me as Manager of Delivery, Developer, and Team Player, by developing software I always want to bring a great and unique value to the Client, development Company I represent, Myself, my Team, and the World at all.

Through the years, I’ve realized that many companies which develop software can use the power of such an organizational structure as Team to bring value and satisfaction to all parties which are involved in the work process.

Here I bring together my vision, approaches and values in a form of Manifesto statements.

For Whom is this Manifesto

Initially, this Manifesto was focused just on Software Development Teams. Now I see that the Manifesto statements below are pretty generic, they define values and approaches which can be applied outside of Delivery and even in not-IT companies.

:loudspeaker: Manifesto

We are working in IT to bring the best value and satisfaction to the customer, company, team, and ourselves.  It’s pretty challenging to find a balance and reach all these goals at once. Through our work, we have come to values and conclusions which will make these goals do not contradict but fit each other:

1The Team is one of the most important values of the company
2The Team is the most important structure of the company, which creates value for the customer.
3A motivated, result-oriented and professional Team can bring more value and satisfaction to the customer and company than just professional Team or group of independent employees.
4Being a part of a Team, with the ability to Own & Invest & Get value from its work, is one of the best ways to make employees motivated, engaged and accountable for results.
5Team individuality, its rights to impact on its work processes and composition should be respected.
6Team Satisfaction is no less important than Customer Satisfaction
7The skill to act as a Team Player is essential for an employee.

How to Sign Manifesto

If you agree to the statements mentioned in the Manifest – You can sign this Manifesto by leaving comment under this page with the text: Agree.

Goals of Manifesto

Let me summarize here, goals I would like to reach by defining of Manifesto.

  1. Way to share my concept to a wide audience in a form of clear and consistent statements. This goal is based on the Manifesto definition.  Thoughts can include key ideas, values, conclusions. 
  2. Promotion of Ideas & Values across people who will potentially help to build solutions or use their results (employees, customers etc.) . The manifesto should help attract attention and gain support and approval of the concept.
  3. Identify and unite like-minded people to bring thoughts and concept itself to life. Manifesto should help to clarify if employees or company agree / have a trust in our ideas, values and ready to support them. Agreement with Manifesto is some kind of marker/entrance gate to work with people or companies with the same mindset.
  4. Give directions for solutions, how to solve the problems which exist in software development.
  5. Align solutions and decisions to make them consistent. It gives ranges for solutions implementations and decisions made during implementation. 
  6. Speed up decision-making of during applying of solutions.  It’s hard to be fully aware about fast changing processes and solutions, but decisions should be made fast. Alignment of decision with the Manifesto will lower risks that the decision will break something or will be inconsistent with the solution.  

This Manifesto created not to be apposed with other statements and modern development approaches as Agile Manifesto, but support them.

What I mean under Team

As mentioned above, the Manifesto is used for Software Development Team, which is well-known term in the IT world (including Outsource). But now we see that the Manifesto is well applicable for Teams across other areas. It attracts people to support it. We see a big power in it and don’t want to use strict definition.

As a result, let’s use the most general definition: A Team it is a group of people united by common goals, interests, ideals, acting together. Team members are united by each other’s support and are collectively responsible for the result of the entire team’s activities.

In some other resources, it can be used a less strict definition from Wiki: A team is a group of individuals (human or non-human) working together to achieve their goal., which is also allowed for the Manifesto.

What is as basis for the Manifesto

This Manifesto was formed based on personal experience of creators, including work in IT and Sports. In addition to this, the Manifesto is based on the following opinions/science knowledge/researches:

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Simple System for Processes Development ?

Sergey BondarevLeave a comment

For a long time I work with teams to create some processes/workflows/guidlines across different groups of employees and structures (project, department, company, communities etc) .

Finally processes we create are spread across multiple places:

  1. Task Management System (like Jira)
  2. Knowledge Base (like Confluence) with process definition/guidlines/policies
  3. Learning Management System (like TalentLMS)
  4. Custom Automation tools (internally developed)
  5. Personal Checklist tools with my personal reminders or todo’s (like Todoist)
  6. Just Brain of some employee 😉

As a result, each time we build a process with such approach we meet the same challenges:

  1. It’s hard for employees to follow process spread in different systems. It creates several useless efforts to check how process was done, identify and repeat forgotten steps.
  2. When the process documented as text it’s hard for employee to go steps by step and nothing to forget. It’s hard to stop and proceed later.
  3. It’s pretty hard to build single, clear and continues process flow in different systems. Especially it’s hard because not only one employee involved in the process, but many from different departments, organizations. The process flow should jump from employee to employee with using of several rules/roles. Usually it requires some automation or just manual work of assistant (if you have them)
  4. It’s hard to support and extend process in different systems. You need to keep it in mind the whole process to not forget something.

Finally, if company have no approach/culture how to build a processes it creates some kind of mess which produces pretty big administrative efforts and impacts on quality (depends on company size). It creates a case when company is focused to make process work, but not the goal of the process, which is more important.

My idea that many of challenges from above can be fixed if company will have some kind of Process Development System which depends on size of the company. As far I understand, it’s a sub set of Business Process Management (BPM) Systems.

Based on my experience, many companies/projects/organizations doesn’t require complicated systems.

In my opinion it can have the following features:

  1. Process flow should look as a set of not complicated Checklists linked together in flow based on input and roles (something similar like Jira ticket flow).
  2. Checklist is a core node of process. It should contain information to proceed or direct links to materials where to find these details.
  3. Checklist item can have ability to save result for step (text, image, set of documents)
  4. Process should have ability to be assigned to user better if automatically on some action/schedule or information (e.g. based on some info from Identity Provider)
  5. Process should have ability to setup due dates for checklists (“steps”)
  6. It should be ability to track Processes state and statistics(current step, how long in this step, estimation of completion)
  7. It should be a ability to communicate inside of processes (steps) with all involved users
  8. Process can have sensitive data. It would be great if it will be possible to set visibility for some conversations, checklist results, checklist and process in general
  9. User should have a dashboard to see checklists waiting for processing
  10. System should have a knowledge base of attached materials
  11. System should have some kind of document-template which will be created (cloned) for each process
  12. It would be good to have any simple integration with another systems ( like Jira) to make them work in pair
  13. It would be awesome if flows can be build in visual way by drag&drop of checklists and linking of them.
  14. It would be great if user can suggest/approve process improvement directly in Process.

Now I’m in search of such system. Please share your experience with systems I’ve described before. It will be really useful.

I think such systems exist already. For example in google I’ve found:

It will be also useful to hear your feedback about topic in general. Thanks!

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Notes on napkins #2

Sergey BondarevLeave a comment

Let me continue practice of small notes about Management:

  1. Good Leader / Manager unites the team, Bad – make team members fill outside
  2. If you not an engine by anchor for your team – it’s time to step out and give ability for a new engine. It will save what you have done.
  3. Every Activity (including Project, Process, or one time change) should be wrapped with key Goal(s)+ KPI(s) to track success. If manager says it’s impossible to setup – they doesn’t understand what they are doing.
  4. Every Activity should have an owner who has a short-term vision/plans in short term (“executor”) and owner who has long-term vision (“visioner”). Both visions are really hard to combine in one person.
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Some notes on napkins

Sergey BondarevLeave a comment

From time to time I make some quick notes. I think it’s a good time to collect them here:

  1. Good Manager simplifies complex things
  2. Great (Clear) idea compensate a lot of gaps to be achieved
  3. Power of Manager is a power of his team. Hire powerfull employees.
    A Manager hire A employees
    B Manager hire B/C employees
    C Manager hire D employees.
    Be an A Manager
  4. Leadership is about bravery: to take reponsibility, make decision, be transparent.
  5. Under Process we still mean exact People. Under Changes we mean exact People.
  6. Before giving benefit, define what you want to take back at the end.
  7. To change some process you need to describe the process at first.
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