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This is the third article in a series covering the topic of Project Team Composition, hence the incredibly cunning name of it.

So we have now established people in our Dream Team should have complementary skills of a similar level. We have also established people in our Newbie Team should have complementary skills of a similar level, mainly because it really doesn’t matter what level you put the team on, it needs to be of a similar level if you are striving towards Project Team Zen.

We have also established that a team can have a bad player, but also that no half decent team becomes awesome only because they have one or two awesome team members. So lets continue with our list, and go through the last two points.

Striving for similar goals

Blue or red pill by Victor de la Fuente

This one might appear to be so obvious you might question why it is in here at all. Trust me, it wouldn’t be here if this wasn’t a problem in the real world. For skilled interested and passionate people the search for more or improved skills never stops. Their quest for perfection never stops and the willingness to improve is never ending. Now, there are two types of people where this does not necessarily apply:

1. Those who are not interested in learning new things, mainly because they could be working anywhere, and have no passion at all for where they actually are currently working. These guys mainly “do a job” and they right now happen to be at an agency for online marketing.
2. Those who had talent, took it a bit (but only so far) but got cocky thinking they know it all, in particular if they are specialists within a specific area. They often dismiss other related areas as “unworthy” or “less efficient” without actually trying them out, which in time turns their skills base more and more obsolete, by which time they are too old and tired to start with something new.

3 by BlondeShot Creative

One of the keywords here is passion. Passionate people often work with something they love so much they would be doing it for free if no one paid them. It is a mystery to those who don’t have passion, and for those who do it is a mystery why the others don’t have it. It is like mixing apples with bricks; they will never truly  understand each other, and it is really tricky to make them blend well on a professional level. In leading companies that manages to be constantly high performing they rarely hire dispassionate people. You are unlucky indeed if your team has one (or indeed more than one), as that means not only has that guy been hired erroneously but also you have been unlucky enough to be paired with him or her, as your ultimate goal for the project no longer can be “awesome” or “excellent“, but that you instead will have to settle for “passable“, “average” and “we got away with it!“, unless you are really lucky.

This can be soul destroying for the passionate people you do have, who have spent an amazingly long time acquiring their skills, often in their spare time, in the hope of rising to glory due to their awesome skills, to instead having to settle for dodging curve balls due to other team members non-knowledge.

Mutual respect for people and skills

Photo by kiyanwang

In all actuality this fourth point is the amalgamation of the three previous points, however this can more often than not hurt the people who have skills, passion and understanding for others, as they spend more time doing “the do”, or trying to fix what is currently broken by a colleague, than trying to figure out how to hide their own incompetence by pointing in every direction but their own.

It matters less if you like your colleagues as long as you respect them and their skills. This is not about “let us not tell him the truth, it might hurt his feelings” or “it isn’t very constructive to put it like that“, but sometimes some people need to hear some hard facts without the others beating around the bush too much.

The thing with respect though, is that it has got to be earnt. The saying “years to build, seconds to erase” applies to respect more than most other things, and if the respect isn’t there, either because it has “gone away” or because it was never there, matters little.

Perfect mix

Photo by Stuck in Customs

So the challenge becomes obviously simple to define: Find people who are all awesome, who wants to do the same things in their careers though they happen to complement everyone else in the team, and who won’t kill each other in the process, right? Well…errrmm…yes. Exactly so. That is what your competition is going for so I don’t see many reasons for you to not trying to do the same.

This does take time though, as it is more important to not hire badly than it is to hire “anyone”. Nothing is as important as keeping your (hopefully) high standards of quality up (I can possibly write another series on the importance of Quality), and nothing can kill Quality as efficiently as having the wrong team on the job.

Speaking of time, if you have lots of it, you can also train people to do almost anything, it is very rare that people are completely hopeless. True enough, time will not make someone who doesn’t have an aptitude for development a good developer, they will be decent at best, but if people have the general skills, making them play nicely together, allowing them to move around between different teams, can be wise. Some people might be awesome in the right surrounding, and not-so-impressive in another. That only works however if you also are able to put the good ones back together for the next project, a thing that definitely is a challenge for most agencies as people get caught up in different new projects after they have been split up. If you can’t recompile your winning teams again you are probably doing something wrongly.

Not about departments

Photo by jouni_k_seppanen

I said in the first article that this is all about Project teams, not Departments, and that I would touch on the difference as well, so I guess I better do that as well. A department, in my mind, is a collection of people that have similar skills as each other. Much like running a set of only-guitarists, or only-midfielders. There are obviously differences between the different members, they can even have different specialities, but that is irrelevant when it comes to actual Project teams. It is rare indeed that a Project team is dysfunctional because an ActionScripter in the agency, who isn’t present in the project team, isn’t a great team player, regardless of how much the other developers like him.

Having said that, there can be instances where people, including yours truly, have over specified one department with only senior awesome can-do people. That is all fine and well, and looks great on paper, but is sort of ignoring that if the rest of the agency isn’t at the same level, or of the same mind set, it will have been for nothing. The actual Project teams will be as good as the weakest link in the chain, and there will be some very bored developers (in my case) who can get fed up with teaching every one else in the Project teams the most fundamental things, whilst waiting for the others to pick up the crudest and most basic amount of skills to understand their own jobs, let alone the job of the developer, which obviously is needed to be able to figure out if they are good or bad.

The lesson learnt? Hire people for your department across seniority levels to be able to throw the correct level into the equally correctly levelled Project team. If that means the Project team consist mainly of juniors it doesn’t have to be bad, and juniors most often equate to “less experienced of hardships”, not necessarily “not as good” so they might get away with it. In fact, they might forge stronger bonds together as a team by achieving, and learning new things, together, which is a good investment for future projects, for them and for your agency.

This is where I could have a long rant on “job title confusion”, regarding seniority levels and “title inflation”, but I think I shall save that for another article altogether.

This rounds up this series for now, but has opened up for future reviews/articles on Quality, Titles and a few other things that has popped into my mind typing this series. Remember, all of this is my views, not the views of my current or past employers or organisations I have been a part of. It is however based on working in various agencies over the last 16 years. If you think I am completely right/wrong, or if you would like to add something, use the comment box below.