Tag: Management

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

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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