November 11, 2024 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Time to Change Your Team
November 11, 2024 at 3:35 pm
I don't know what to think of this advice. In my state government job, the IT division (I'm including both operations and developers) is about 200 people. As far as developers go there's about 45 developers. I don't know how many teams there are. I'm in the developer section, and there's a maintenance and support section. But there's a lot of discrepancies. For example, the development section I'm in tends to do more maintenance. And the maintenance & support section tends to do more development. My former boss, who retired in the March-April timeframe, said that there was a movement afoot to reorganize the development and maintenance & support sections. I asked my new boss how progress was going in the reorganization, and she said nothing was happening, so upper management isn't interested in reorganizing.
However, the most important reason why I don't think this will work is more people, in the development section, work alone on projects. All the projects are small, so putting two or more people on anything is a waste of resources.
I've written before in these forums of one coworker who is a major PITA. He will rewrite anyone else's code, if he doesn't like it and will not tell them that he's doing that. He's got Carte Blanche to treat everyone else like dirt and he knows no one will stop him. He certainly isn't a team player. I've learned not to work with him. Fortunately, he is the only one who treats everyone else like crap.
Something else I've seen on the Maintenance & Support team is they've hired several people from India. They tend to be excellent developers, the only ones who use modern technologies. But they keep to themselves and don't like anyone else who isn't from India working with them. My guess is this is a language and cultural barrier thing, so in a way it's understandable. Nevertheless, I wish they were open to allowing others (like me) onto their teams, but they aren't.
Bottom line, due to long habit people, including management, aren't open to reorganizing IT.
Rod
November 12, 2024 at 4:24 pm
The biggest structural change I went through was when the organisation moved from teams arranged for their technical responsibilities to teams aligned to a product. It was a squads/tribes/chapter/guilds thing.
Up to that point a structural change was usually as a result of either acquisitions/mergers or redundancies.
The thing is, unless management thinking changes (which it rarely does) everything slumps back to the status quo which is why one of the hardest things to change is corporate culture and culture eats strategy for breakfast. Conway's law manifests itself in many different ways.
My experience has been that change often runs out of steam. The instigators have the fact that they started and carried through change on their LinkedIn profile and then Foxtrot Oscar before the bit that requires fortitude and perseverance kicks in. Some changes are eventually successful.
Success has many fathers but disaster is always an orphan. At a management level people sign up to a change but once the parents of change have gone and it is an orphan the survivors are quick to distance themselves from it.
I heard it said of one of the best manager I have ever met that her teams always outperformed the A & B teams and people could not work out why this was always the case and how she did it. Anyone who worked for her could tell you in an instant. From that I believe that change needs the right manager with the right skills.
November 12, 2024 at 7:57 pm
The flip side of trying to reorganize to get better, or avoid losing steam as David noted above, is to do it regularly and often. MS has done this, and the reorgs aren't always better at the team level. One team might get worse with a different lead or new members, but it only is in place for a year, so there's a chance things will be better next year.
At RG, we do some movement of leads, but then let most people chose their team.
I think the key to performing better always starts with management, and with some level of commitment to learning to use people in the best place, at the right time.
November 12, 2024 at 10:13 pm
I've seen some business fashions come and go.
When I started my career it was coming to the end of one where managers who wanted to progress had to move through the various disciplines. My Dad was an export sales guy but he had to pass basic accountancy exams, manage people on the production line, learn about kilns, glazes and different types of clay (pottery industry).
I came across someone a few years back who had accidentally rotated themselves across the business disciplines. This gave him a well rounded appreciation for the business as well as a network of contacts. For him the experience was a force multiplier. I think its a fashion that needs to come back. Perhaps it would be the saviour of agile development?
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