The Right Project Team
Learn How To Manage & Ship A Great Software Product
Get 20 lessons about how Software CEOs can grow their team, improve their culture, and create efficient work processes on the way to building a massively successful Software Company.
It’s critical to bring the right talent to work on your project at the right time. Here’s the way to do it:
- Assess the outcomes you’re looking for. Then determine the skills required before recruiting people. Don’t start with the people you think might fit, based on relationships from past work experiences.
- Then use all your connections to find the talent you need. Once you’re clear on what you need, put the word out. Friends, clients, contacts from previous jobs and assignments.
- Skills matter, but so does motivation. When choosing development partners, it’s not just about the quality of their software, but more about their collaborative attitude, humility, willingness to put the project first and readiness, willingness and ability to jump in and identify and fix bugs and modify and adapt the software. See our earlier article The Right Project Attitude.
- Consider using multiple development teams. Although there may be some undesirable competition and coordination challenges among separate groups — employees, consultants, temps, vendors — the benefits of different perspectives and challenging assumptions may be worth it.
- Bring users. Make representatives of several different target user communities part of your Development Advisory Group and involve them continuously throughout the process.
- Make sure people on the team know how to do what you are asking them to do. Sometimes people will refuse or simply fail to do something, and take the risk of seeming stubborn and arbitrary, rather than admit they don’t know how to do it. Find out early, and if they don’t know how, give them what they need to learn.
- Make it clear up front that team membership is not necessarily for the duration. Recognize that different skills may be required at different stages of the project. You may not need every team member for the entire duration of the project. (Think about the construction of a house: You would not expect a tile mason to be there at the beginning of construction or the guys who dig the footings for the foundation to be there at the end of the project.)
Your project team is a dynamic entity, changing, expanding and contracting to meet the needs of your project. Make performing these steps a continuing habit, and bring in new people as needed and let others move along as necessary.
Learn How To Manage & Ship A Great Software Product
Get 20 lessons about how Software CEOs can grow their team, improve their culture, and create efficient work processes on the way to building a massively successful Software Company.