Building good Team Process

by Joel Joseph

The article will help you understand different phases that I went through for building a good Development / Engineering team process for solving company's Engineering needs.

Please do note that the information here is purely within the scope of my experience and people I interacted in my professional life.

Every term and terminology in the article are defined by me, which helps me to document my life experience in a simple way. You may take this as a case study and define your own process.

The term 'Process' in this article refers to steps you follow, tools you use, the ways you take in planning things the end goal being to solve a problem by combining individual efforts into collective results

In my case the main focus was on defining process for:

  • Task Management
  • Communication and Collaboration
  • DevOps
  • Hiring new developers
  • Tools used

Phases and Stages





Stage One : The idea of this stage is, by the end of all the phases in this stage you will have a perfectly working process for your team. This stage is somewhat time consuming but most of the time it's a onetime investment for reaching your goal and hence it one of the important stage that may define your success

  • Input gathering
  • Experimenting
  • Process Definition
  • Implementation

Stage Two : This stage is repeated over a period of cycles, for me it was every 6 month or yearly. This make sure that your process is improved by eliminating the bottlenecks

  • Feedback and Review



Input Gathering

This is the first phase where you start to observe and take note of the organisation and its requirements. Each and every organisation or company may have different working style and goals. You may have past experience in some other organisation and companies but you keep them aside and keep on observing how everything is currently working.

Experimenting

Here you will start defining the initial process by studying the data collected in input gathering phase and try to implement it with the help of your team. The process is experimented for short term and may start review of the process as soon as you reach a bottleneck. You may also try to learn from process that are followed in other companies or organisation

Process Definition

This phase comes after the experimenting phase and by this time you will have a working Process defined for your team. The idea is to document this process and make sure to educate your team on the process. Each member of your team should have clear understanding of the process and you will have to make sure that everyone follows this process

Implementation

This phase is infinite and here you will repeatedly follow the defined process and make sure that each and every one of your team follows it. you may also define an onboarding process so that if there is a new addition to your team it will help them to get onboard in following the process quickly

Feedback and Review

This is implemented over a period of time in cycles and in my case it was every 6 month or yearly. Here you will take feedback on your current process and also review the do's and don'ts and after studying the data you will try to eliminate the bottlenecks that slows down your team. You will also be studying the result from your previous year looking into your success and failures and tweak your process to improve the results