Until people use your work it’s just fluff.
I’m busy trying to get an app into people’s hands for testing. It’s so close, and so frustrating at this stage.
I can feel the pull of “we don’t need tests: they’ll just slow us down”. Happily, frustratingly, I know better.
The pain of watching the list of tasks go down, and then up again as we realise that there are other steps to do too. It seems to keep going. But getting those tasks out into the open helps clarify our position and align the work of me and my colleague.
Make it usable
Until people are able to use our app we don’t know if our assumptions are correct. The work is nothing, it is fluff, until people use it and validate, or invalidate the ideas in our app. It is essential that we get it into their hands.
When people see it, then they can tell us the “You forgot… ” things, and we can go “Doh. Of course.”. That moment will come, but we need to patiently collaborate and do our work together to get us there.
Make it visible
Today I’m working on my own and realise that the last two days of me collaborating with the other developer make the work easier. We can ask questions, show each other something to discuss and fix issues. That makes the work more fun and positive.
My colleague said they want a list of things to do today so each item can be ticked off the list as it’s completed. By getting all the items into the list you realise the many things we still need to do.
I added my own list of items to get them out of my head too. This is what I’m working on today. I can prioritise the items to finish the urgent ones, or the ones that need to follow after another item.
These lists get things out of our heads and lighten our cognitive load. We don’t have to remember, the piece of paper can.
Teach people to prioritise lists to get things out the door
Guide your people to prioritise their lists. It’s not useful to do low value things when high value ones are waiting. Of course, they can do low value ones when they are low on energy. I plan the high value ones when I have longer uninterrupted blocks of time.
By doing this they can get their work out the door into the hands of people who need it. This will let people validate their work and provide feedback. Yes, students all think they are doing amazing things that ‘everyone’ will want. This is often wrong. Yes, some people want it, but not everyone, and not always in the manner they plan. Again, this is useful information.
Teach them, guide them to get prototypes and early versions into people’s hands for feedback. This will make their work more useful and exciting. I’m looking forward to the mixed feedback: what did we get right, and what did we get wrong? Scary and exciting.
This post is part of a project pulling together my materials and ideas about Teaching Team Collaboration: the Human-Side of Software Development for software development to students.
If you’d like to be notified of future posts, then please sign up for more using the adjacent form. When you sign up, then I’ll send you a free copy of the collaboration rules as a PDF from the book. You can also follow me on LinkedIn
The ideas above are from my book 101+ Ideas to Improve Team Collaboration, which covers all of these little things that students can do to improve their collaboration. Also available via Kindle.