What it takes be an Ittecan. 3
Some of you might not know, but here at Itteco we do our work applying Project machine principles. In theory, project machine is a certain structure of people, communication methods and collaboration between team members, who are ready to solve project tasks and problems in a stand-alone mode and on their own, without nagging control of the manager.
Project machine is not a methodology, like agile or SCRUM, it doesn’t cover the risk management process, requirements gathering, bug-fixing, analysis, QA, defining complexity or priorities. Project machine is rather an organizational layer on top of any methodology.
Manager has a significantly different role in the project machine approach. He is not a lead developer – he is the person responsible for continuous process flow with no glitches and stops.
Project machine defines and shapes team members, who should possess certain qualities:
- self-contained developers, who are apt in flying solo;
- talkative and sociable team workers;
- result oriented and motivated individuals;
- perpetually polishing their skills and learning something new;
- possessing the same sharing passion.
1. Flying solo.
People at Itteco are willing and ready to work autonomously. That is the main requirement, the chief characteristic feature. It’s your top priority to self-organize your tasks and workflow.
Our team consists only of people, who are perfectly fine with working on their own with no need of a babysitter or a nurse nearby to assign tasks. We don’t have a manager, who explains developers how exactly to perform that task and breaks the complicated jobs into chunks.
However, we do have a team, backlog (scope of work) and a manager, as an interface for the customer (product owner). Everybody is involved in the project flow on all stages and holds responsibility for one’s actions or non-actions.
2. Communication is the key.
Developers are an essential part of the communication interface with a customer. Not only manager talks and gathers feedback from a customer. All team members are equal in their rank and can address a client should a question arise. Involving everyone in the communication process gives developers and designers a better understanding of the work they will carry out and shape a clear vision of the final product. Furthermore, involving each team member on the initial phase will let foresee potential risks and minimize them before the actual start of the project.
3. It’s all about results.
Ittecans are ready to take their own responsibility for any task. We are willing to say “I’ve done it!” We focus primary on the results, but not to the process. Who cares what you were doing, when at the end you haven’t done anything? What’s more important, it’s of no customer’s concern at all.
Working in a team of three or pairs does help to stay on track and achieve more. That is why our developers are organized in the groups of this particular size.
4. Learn 24/7/365.
Unlike traditional outsourcing approach, we do not staff our teams with junior developers to cut the cost of the development and increase profit. Each and every member of Itteco is a precious, highly gem-cut professional. We hire only best out there, who are ready to work in the project machine.
You can increase your skills and knowledge only by constant self-education, investing time and money in yourself. We do appreciate and support our developers getting better and better. The more professional you are – the more tasks you can handle – the more money you earn. It’s that simple.
5. Sharing is your passion.
You’ve learned something new, discovered a fascinating fact, successfully finished a project, reading a great book, working on solving a dead-end task – it all happens with you everyday. By sharing vital information with peers we are creating a strong knowledge network, learn and gain authority. Building a network of trust is a challenging task, but we work in this direction. We’ve got blogs to post, status updates to push and our social network to socialize at. Each Ittecan understands this responsibility and sharing is one of our passions, blogging staying next.
Remember these 5 principles of a self-motivated, result-oriented, autonomous and connective workflow with constant knowledge gain and sharing, and you will fit perfectly into Itteco.
Please let me know your thoughts and ideas on work style in the comments!
So, what is this famous “Project machine”?
From my opinion, one of the problem, that developers does not feel responsibility for their work or loosing this feeling easily along with initial passion to a project.
Mistakes are a part of being human. I do appreciate mistakes made by developers as long as their source is not the negligence due to absence of the basic responsibility. However, at the same time punishments can not be the proper tool in modern trust-based relations in distant management. As they would be accepted as blind actions.
Instead, taking in account that we’ll prefer to care about developers and do not fire them, there is an obvious need to make a step away from pure scrum. To motivate them more and came closer to idea of ’self-contained developers’ we have to pass a portion of the responsibility to them. It’s quite common that in distant development, we usually have isolated modules in the project, and developers are not interchangeable. In the case of team lead absence, it would be just a tiny formal step to pass responsibility in time and functionality of those modules to the corresponding developers.
It’s a whole new topic, Oleksandr.
To keep up engagement, motivation and morale, team has to achieve a series of micro-successes as the road to bigger success.
Scrum has it all covered: user stories are resolved one by one, one starts after previous is finished. In other agile variations, the entire team would even work on a same story at any given time.
The result is: team motivated, united and thus committed. Combined with Pavel’s pre-conditions, it brings outstanding achivements.