5 Common Challenges When Working in a Team and How to Overcome Them
Hello readers. This week’s blog is about how to work as a team. First, meet our team: our name is Phoenix Programming and our members are Emma, Sushma, Ali, Frank, and Pedro. Appropriately, we effectively worked together to write this blog, and each thought of a challenge we’ve experienced and how we overcame it. Through thinking about our own personal experiences, we were able to come up with some great ideas. Here is what we came up with:
Challenge #1: Knowing Each Others Limits and Strengths
One issue that may occur when working as a team, be it new or old is not properly understanding the capabilities of your teammates. Not understanding your teammates can lead to tasks being assigned to teammates that may not be able to make the set deadline.
Solution: Knowing Your Team
One of the Leadership Traits that I learned while serving in the Marine Corps was to “Employ Your Unit in Accordance With its Capabilities”. Know your own/teammates' limits and strengths, then assigning them tasks or goals that are well-suited for them will set them up for success!
-Ali Daley
Challenge #2: Misunderstanding
When a new team gets together and you all have different backgrounds, you discover certain things may not mean the same thing to each person on the team. That can be due to a variety of things such as different accents or dialects or a misunderstanding in the information itself.
Solution: The Back Brief
There’s something I like to do called a back brief. This is when you explain the task/information back to the person explaining it to make sure both of you understand the task. This gives an opportunity to make sure everyone is on the same page and helps identify what you may not understand because you cannot brief what you do not know.
-Pedro Delgadillo
Challenge #3: Assigning Tasks in Large-Scale Projects
When working on a large-scale project with many tasks to accomplish, it can be easy for some things to slip through the cracks and get forgotten or neglected. This is doubly true when working in a team, as the team not only needs to keep track of what tasks are in progress or completed but also who’s responsible for doing them.
Solution: The Kanban Board
A good solution to this is the kanban board, an organizational system developed at Microsoft and inspired by Toyota’s production line. A kanban board is simply a wall (physical or digital) with notes on it and a few labeled columns. The simplest version has three: To Do, In Progress, and Done. Each note is labeled with a task and who is responsible for completing it, and team members move the notes between columns based on the status of the corresponding task. This model is very flexible to any team environment, as more or different columns can be used to more closely track the progress of tasks (ie. which part of the DevOps lifecycle a feature is currently in). Kanban boards are widely used in many industries, but particularly in software development.
- Franklin Navarro
Challenge #4: Working Across Time Zones
When working with a team that is spread across time zones in the country, the overlap of working hours of the team is less and it is very important to be more communicative about the tasks, immediate needs, and deadlines to meet.
Solution: Work Platform e.g. Slack
Find the best overlap hours of the day for the entire team, and utilize overlap hours to address high-priority activities. One can set his/her working hours in the Calendar. The team can use work platforms like Slack to communicate with the team and make sure everyone is on the same page with their respective tasks.
-Sushma Bandaru
Challenge #5: Defining the project scope
When working on a new project with a team an issue that you might face is defining the project scope, knowing which features meet the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and which features your team could be deemed as an icebox is very crucial.
Solution: Planning Platforms e.g. Whimsical and Trello
Finding a planning tool that everyone finds easy to navigate is important, as well as taking the time to plan the project features thoroughly. User stories play an important role in deciding which features meet the MVP. In agile software development, user stories help articulate what value a product feature can bring and have a better understanding of why users want a certain functionality. It helps the product manager and development team shift their focus from writing about the software features to discussing the features.
-Emma Doale
Lessons Learned:
After working together on this blog we saw how these very same solutions came into play. Knowing my teammates and talking to them daily, I can tell we are growing as a team and starting to communicate in our own special ways. Phoenix Programming is a great team that works really well together.
