The Importance of Team Building for IT Team Development — Case Study
How is possible to develop effectively a team?
At this year, I wrote an article to my MBA in IT Management inspired by coexistence with my team. This is an abstract. I hope you enjoy it!
Context
The area of Information Technology (IT) was for many years a service provider, where it acted only as an entity capable of providing resources that would serve the other parts of the companies, as a tool to achieve business objectives. However, time has changed and today, having the IT area close to the business has become more than necessary. And since then, IT teams have begun to experience a new dynamic of presentation and organization to live up to their new position. In the midst of this, organizational models, frameworks and methodologies emerged that would support and support this new way of acting. Among them, Team Building has been a way to get high development teams, where members are aware of their duties and duties, their skills and weaknesses and how they can work together to achieve a better job development.
A report from Gartner says:
By 2021, 40% of IT staff will be “versatilists” holding multiple roles, most of which will be business- rather than technology-related.
The affirmation reforces the needs from IT to structure ways and methodologies that teams can adapt with the new context. The co:lab team was one of these.
The co:lab team
The co:lab team is like a consulting, where the main goal is help others teams with their necessities. At the company, co:lab usually do:
- Promote meetings between areas;
- Apply courses like: design thinking, sites construction, storytelling, etc;
- Field research;
- System and websites coding;
- Etc;
The main vision from the team is:
Promote dialogues and generate connections, creating an environment collaborative and relaxed that supports the inclusive solutions constructions, centered in user and sustainable for the company.
Since between end of 2016 and start of 2017, the leadership started to do many movements to develop the skills and strength's team.
The numbers show us where co:lab arrived:
How the co:lab achieved these numbers and became more triggered?
Answer: TEAM BUILDING!
Team Building
The "Team Building" is a term emerged between 1924 e 1932 after studies from Elton Mayo, denominated “The Hawthorne Studies”, that searched to prove how to increase productivity of the teams. The research observed that productivity began start to improve when the team realized the care by managers with them and with the environment.
From this, a large quantity of researches and studies confirmed that team building is a way to develop teams, once the members are conscious of their skills and weaknesses and how they can work together to achieve a better work's performance.
How to start?
Every team’s leadership needs to understand the reality of the team. It’s necessary to map it, understand where it are and what to do to develop it. Some researches and studies can be used together. Some of them:
- 4 C's, from William Dyer e Jeffrey Dyer;
- The five dysfunctions of a team, from Patrick Lencioni;
- Stages of Team Development, from Bruce Tuckman;
- Situational leadership, from Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard.
They can related as:
4 C's William Dyer e Jeffrey Dyer
This theorie can help the leadership to map and understand the main caracteristics from the team in four points of view as below:
Context
Team context is understood as the organizational context in which the team is inserted (DYER and DYER, 2007). It is the context that defines: reward system, structure and culture of the company. Once it is clear, it is possible to measure progress.
Composition
According to DYER and DYER 2007 apud COLLINS 2011:
“Team composition refers to the skills and attitudes of team members. You have to have the right people to get things done collectively and the team to perform at their peak. ”
In short, team composition is divided into the following topics: skills, experience, team motivation, and team size. Any work that is performed needs certain technical precision and soft skills.
Competence
Teams often have certain competencies regardless of any individual team member (DYER and DYER, 2007). In short, team competencies boil down to: The team’s ability to solve problems, communicate, make decisions, and manage conflicts. As a practical example, we can look at the role of a Scrum Master of an IT team. In addition to various project development responsibilities, the Scrum Master is responsible for training teams to self-manage activities so that team members are empowered to make decisions (JUNIOR, 2017 apud SILVA; LOVATO 2016). In this context, a high development team could have the Scrum Master member subtracted and still continue to operate.
Change
Change management comes down to the team’s ability to monitor their performance and promote change as needed (DYER and DYER, 2007). According to LOVIZZARO (2017):
“The reason for making changes boils down to the simple fact that neither the external nor the internal environment has their continuities assured.”
High-maturity teams tend to have definite processes for monitoring, analyzing and definition of action plans to implement changes.
Stages of Team Development: Bruce Tuckman
Members from a team can have different opinions and understands about their position and from the team itself and where they need to go. This theorie can help to trace where exactly the team are and which actions are needed to improve them.
Forming
In the IT area, in small teams that have a high number of interns or junior professionals, it is possible to observe a high degree of dependence of these towards older professionals. The high degree of dependency of leaders or colleagues, as well as the lack of clarity about team goals, are related to the characteristics of the forming stage.
Storming
Inexperience with technologies or how to perform a demand tends to create friction among IT team members. There is, for example, friction by choosing the definition of technology to build some solution. In many cases, developers end up adopting preferred languages and hardly give up on them. This conflict and resistance relates to the storming stage.
Norming
Once a standard technology is defined among designers (such as an image editor, for example), professionals tend to be more collaborative in developing demands. It is possible to perceive the channeling of forces that seek shyly, to accept opinions and the sharing of ideas that promote advances.
Performing
When IT members focus on the content of demand rather than the technology they will adopt to reach a delivery resolution, as well as team action will deliver results that truly impact users’ lives, we can say that is in the performing stage.
Adjourning
In 1975, Bruce Tuckman and Mary Jensen revisited the theory and added one more stage, adjourning. It is defined as the end stage of the team life cycle (TUCKMAN and JENSEN, 1977).
The five dysfunctions of a team: Patrick Lencioni
According to LENCIONI, 2002:
“Organizations cannot achieve teamwork because they unknowingly fall prey to five natural but dangerous pitfalls that I call the five dysfunctions of a team.”
These are described below.
Absence of trust
When a new IT team is formed, there is often a lack of prior contact and knowledge of members’ prior work, which can lead to a lack of trust. This lack of trust stems from the unwillingness to be vulnerable within the group (LENCIONI, 2012).
Fear of conflict
Pride among software developers about the quality of their own code and disregard for someone else’s code tends to lack opinion, characterizing the fear of conflict. The failure in the communication process, as well as the inability to engage in healthy debates, resorting to veiled discussions demonstrate this (LENCIONI, 2012).
Lack of commitment
When members do not express their opinions, they may feign agreement during meetings, characterizing a lack of commitment (LENCIONI, 2012).
Avoidance of Accountability
The lack of real commitment and adherence move members not to act on others, evidencing the act of avoiding responsibilities (LENCIONI, 2012).
Inattention to results
Inattention to results generally tends to appear when problems are reported by clients to the detriment of silence by the executors of a demand. When members do not hold each other accountable for their activities and place their egos, personal development above the team’s collective goals (LENCIONI, 2012).
Situational leadership: Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard
Maturity is a subject in every human life. The maturity usually is worked to get better, but sometimes, this can be not true. With this, leadership need to adopt a posture between this comportament.
Interestingly, both managers and team members understand the maturity level of the team. According to LOVIZZARO, 2007:
“The level of maturity (readiness) is defined as the ability and willingness of people to take responsibility for directing their own behavior.”
Once a team’s overall context has been mapped out, identifying its strengths, weaknesses and maturity, team management can adopt a leadership style action plan in response to the team’s level of maturity. According to LOVIZZARO (2017) apud HERSEY and BLANCHARD (2001):
“The leadership style appropriate to each of the four levels of maturity includes the right dosage of task behavior (direction) and relationship behavior (support)”.
What co:lab did?
Year after year, co:lab tried very hard to construct a collaborative powerful mindset between the members. The leadership provided space and security to members try many ways to do their jobs. While members started to get more skills and more maturity, more the leadership started to delegate important rules and projects to the members.
The close relationship between leadership and members created the necessary confidence to the all team to improve their jobs, once any kind of proposed activities were welcome by them.
Some methods adopted by co:lab in this process:
Adoption of a working methodology: Kanban
The all company started to work at the Kanban methodology. The interesting thing at co:lab was the way the methodology was introduced and improved by the time. Co:lab made several meets to define and make necessary changes in the methodology. This bring the team a robust way to organize and priorize tasks.
Improvement in internal team communication: Fast feedback
The fast feedback its an important process to resolve internal conflicts and to empower members from they responsibilities. In co:lab, to have many persons with different characteristics it almost ever good, but sometimes, can be a problem. Personal values can be misunderstandings or don't be agreed by other people. The process is a means for members to explain themselves and to keep things work well and to maintain a good environment.
Redefining Expectations and Redefining Purpose
Many teams starts with a main group of rules. But, in the practice can be different. The people usually have different visions from team responsibilities. With the co:lab, this didn't was different. To solve this disfunction, co:lab made a large numbers of meetings to understand and to align and redefine members expectations about the team future. With this process, co:lab could redefine the real purpose and experience it.
Creation of team culture and identity
Dynamics made it possible to define: culture; values; personality, roadmap and target audience of the team. The team began to adopt cultural principles and a personality line for internal and external behavior. The team had gained a basis for judging decision making according to these characteristics and goals.
Investment in increasing intellectual capital of the team: study island
The IT is an area in constant development. The people from this area needs to update themselves to keep themselves in consonance with the market. How is possible to members keep learning with demands concurring? To solve this, co:lab created the “study island”, a space of one week to a defined member stay free from demands and to be able to study close themes from area.
Monitoring and pursuit of process improvements: monthly review
Every team needs to monitore and discuss about their performance. The monthly review is an important process to members speak openly about the good and bad things occurred in the month. With this approach, co:lab started to define and execute action plans to improve internal process. Over time, the bad problems started to fall.
Implementation of IT Technical Strategic Planning: PETC
By the end of 2017, the team was not fully aware of the IT infrastructure they had available. The infrastructure was lagging behind the latest technologies, as well as making the implementation of POC or MVP unfeasible. Thus, a technical strategic planning was carried out with the objective of solving this problem. The planning made it possible to define action plans that had an effect on the team, including the hiring of more members.
What the success keys from co:lab?
Priority. The difference from another teams was the way that co:lab’s leadership prioritized the team development. While almost teams of TI try to put out fire in received demands, co:lab tried very hard to do a balance between "urgent demands" and it development.
AND
Empower. A wrong comportment from leaderships towards members is not empower them. People needs to won a chance to prove themselves. People needs demonstrate what they can do. Besides this, leaderships needs to trust in members to advance and conquiste projects. Members needs to be challenged and protected in a balanced way.
The team managed to earn those points and incorporated it into their way of being.
Conclusions
Projects are executed by people of all maturities, experiences and skills and in the area of information technology, this is no different. Any nature of work needs people who are motivated and willing to embrace a team’s culture as if it were a personal value. When this point is reached, it is where we can observe evolution.
In this context, we can consider Team Building as a mindset, that is, something to be consolidated in the minds of team members, as there are numerous ways to analyze and work on it.
The co:lab managed to move from a training development stage to a working time in a considerable amount of time, having managed to firmly establish its main aspects in order to act on demands with business partner characteristics.
All this was obtained through the dynamic constants reported in the article. The IT teams around her saw this feature and began integrating co:lab as a business partner.
The article concludes with the team’s analysis until 2018, the year when the high degree of development was present. With this, the article is open for future analysis and findings regarding the practice of Team Building.
References
DYER, William G; DYER, Jeffrey H. Equipes que fazem a diferença (team building): estratégias comprovadas para desenvolver equipes de alta performance. São Paulo, São Paulo: Editora Saraiva, 2011.
PANETTA, Kasey; Gartner. Gartner Top Strategic Predictions for 2018 and Beyond. Available in: https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-strategic-predictions-for-2018-and-beyond/
HERSEY, Paul e BLANCHARD, Kenneth. Management of Organizational Behavior — Leading Human Resources. NJ USA: Prentice Hall, 2001.
LENCIONI, Patrick. The five dysfunctions of a team: a leadership fable. (2002, Primeira edição, pág.1–242).
LOVIZZARO, Marco Antonio V. Apostila — Gestão de pessoas e habilidades gerenciais. (2017). Faculdade Impacta Tecnologia.
TUCKMAN, Bruce W. Developmental sequence in small groups (1965, 6 ed., Vol. 63, pág. 1–16). Psychological Bulletin.
SANTANA, Carlos Henrique C. A IMPORTÂNCIA DO TEAM BUILDING PARA O DESENVOLVIMENTO DE EQUIPES NA ÁREA DE TI — ESTUDO DE CASO. Available in: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SV5MvFJ3q2fqAgOC_FNdvo_YnLoXWiEu/view
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