Team Dynamics: Happier == More Productive!
If you already know or even implement agile into your project, the next step you need to know is how to make the internal relation good and stable amidst the agile bustle. The key of agile or even most of software development methodology is communication between the members. But how we can keep the relation and the member feelings so we can create a more productive environment?
First of all, we need to know what actually a team is. Based on teamtechnology,
A team is a special instance of a group in which the commonality is a shared goal. This fact, itself, creates a dynamic between team members because they are dependent on each other for success.
It’s like a sports team, wins and loses as a whole, not just as an individual and it’s our job to make the team works in a dynamic way. What is Dynamic team?
What Is It
Based on teamtechnology again,
Team dynamics are the unconscious, psychological forces that influence the direction of a team’s behaviour and performance. They are like undercurrents in the sea, which can carry boats in a different direction to the one they intend to sail.
How we can make our team be a dynamic team? Is it just like a flow that will pass without we realize? How do we know our team status based on what currently we felt? Based on intellectsoft, there are 5 main stages of group dynamics, which are:
- Forming.
In this stage, we are currently not knowing each other very well, it’s the perfect time to observe and adjust. - Storming.
After that, we get into the storming stage which involves confrontation among the members. We will discuss how to achieve goals and what can be done by each individual. - Norming.
Now, the members arrive at some collective decision and agree on how to reach a common goal. - Performing.
This is a productive stage. The tasks are assigned, everybody knows their mission and role, and they start doing their job. - Adjourning.
Our project has finished. Now, the team surely wants to celebrate their success.
Now, my team has entered the performing stage and we already facing struggles together. We still maintain our relation with many activities, online and also offline. We also like to show our moments in our media social. Check our Instagram post below here.
This is our team celebrating the release of “To All The Boys part 2”, which is a romance-comedy movie from Netflix, and also celebrating valentine's day. It’s kind of funny for all of us who never celebrating valentine but the idea suddenly came and because all of our Scrum team are men with two other, Scrum Master and Product Owner, are women it just like “why not?”. Perfect moment, perfect time, with a perfect team!
Team Slogan
Every team needs a slogan that can represent that team ora make the team more connected in the same direction as the initial goals. We have a slogan for our team, which is “dicarryferro”. It comes from Bahasa and means Ferro, one of our smartest member, can carry (doing all the tasks) all of us. It might seem negative, but it actually can be a positive means which is that we hope we can do our tasks like Ferro and keep motivated us to be smarter and also to be more productive. Besides that, our slogan is also a joke for us who always make Ferro as our frontline-men if we had any issues.
Team Capacity Building
To improve our knowledge, information, hard and also soft skills, we need a few activities to support us in building this team capacity. There are some important things to be pointed out for our team capacity building and we will discuss it one-by-one.
- Relation
We keep maintaining our relation by meet each other on the campus or in the chatting group using telegram. Before the WFH (Work From Home) every Tuesday and Thursday we often eat lunch together to discuss our project or just playing around with games (like table tennis) or discussing something with no course-related topic. It’s important to keep updating your partner mentally or physically condition so we can adjust our self and fill the position that our team needs. - Skills
For this project, we are using some stack that we never learned before, like Flask and Vue.js. Language is not a problem but the foundation of our programming skills that are important. We always explore something new in our sprint, try, error, fix, and finally can deliver it to our clients. Of course, there’s a bunch of problems that come because the lack of skills but this is what makes us always trying our best as we can and it helps us to improve our skill. Until now, maybe we already learned some new things or even make a deeper understanding of stack that we use, like Git, Sonarqube, Deployment system and others. - Knowledge
This project opens our minds to the “real-world” that we will be facing sooner. The work-flow, complex architecture, and trying to be professional in front of our clients are just a few things that we already learned. This “knowledge” may be referring to our soft skills that we need to do this project and of course, that will be useful for us in the future. Luckily for us, PPL Fasilkom UI is helping to facilitate their students to improving their knowledge with many workshops or we call it guest lectures. In this guest lecture, we are given a specific topic related to our project, like SCRUM, directly from professionals in big companies. So many new things we can learn, so many experiences we can hear, and also so much memory that we spent together. This photo below are a documentation of my team participating in one of the guest lectures from PPL Fasilkom UI with topic SCRUM.
Thanks to this guest lecture, we are more confident doing our SCRUM event or discussing the methodology that used for this project with our client.
As I told before, our team maybe has so many people with big diversity. Not only we need to adjust ourselves to the current situation but also we must support the team with the good attitude that needed. We need a servant leader attitude.
Servant Leader
To help you understand what servant leader means, here is a definition quote from
The idea of servant leadership is that the typical hierarchy where employees are supposed to serve their bosses is turned upside down. Instead, leaders serve their people.
There are many tips for being a good servant leader that we can try, but here are a few things that we try to implement for our group project (from inc).
- Every person has value and deserves civility, trust, and respect.
Maybe this is an important thing to remember. How do you want to be trusted by others if you never trust them? How do you want to be respected by others if you never respect them? The key to good communication may be the trust between one and others, so we will always try to trust and respect each other. - Listen intently and observe closely.
Servant leaders really listen to their people and they actively solicit their participation, their ideas, and their feedback. In our group, we always try to really listen to each other and also observe some problems closely until we understood it better. - Demonstrate persistence.
Servant leaders realize that one or two conversations may not have the desired change in an employee’s assumptions or mindset. So they are tenacious and invest whatever time it takes to educate and inspire servant leadership practices in the members of their team. - Act as selfless mentors.
Servant leaders know that by helping to guide the people who work for them, they will help their employees learn vital skills that will both improve their performance, and improve them as people.
Conclusion
Up and down, maybe it’s what most of the group feels about their internal relation. One day you’re being a person who always your team wants, but maybe someday you feel not good enough for your team. This thing may be causing any problem that we will never imagine and it’s important for us as a team to prevent this to happen. Besides that, if this problem happens, it must give some effect on the development progress that will causing less productive and often make a miss-communication.
There are many methods you and your team can implement based on you all personalize. Every method has advantages and also disadvantages, and it’s our job to matching what we need and what we can try to create the perfect team!
