Set all the lights to green for a smooth team collaboration.
A friend, Clarke Ching, helps software teams deliver work more smoothly. He uses the motorcade metaphor. Presidents use motorcades to travel smoothly from one place to another by forcing all other traffic to stop so that they can get through because they’re important, so others can wait. Even other presidents wait too.
You should use this process too in your team collaboration. This helps you get off to a good start and to keep everything on track until you deliver your product. The goal is to set a date, and then align all development work with this date.
Apply the motorcade method
Start with the date as the deadline. This might be the end of term, or two weeks before then, when coursework is due. If you’re a startup, then it’s the time when you know some big event occurs: that demo to investors, or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s just to ‘get something out the door’.
Next align all decisions that need to be completed to make this a success. Discuss with the team what needs to happen: resolve hosting, and deployment, whose permission is required for things to happen? Wanting to do a survey, then it might need ethical approval from someone. If you don’t know, then find out who does. Talk to them. Get it signed off by that person. If need be, arrange a meeting to talk them through what they need to do to help you.
It might not be obvious to the person, what you’re asking them to do. They might need you to help them. They might be busy with a million and one other things, so might not appreciate what you’re trying to do. Help them do this so that you can move on.
This works for all of the slow processes that take time. You do the paperwork, then wait for them to be approved. Maybe they come back to you, and need more information. Set these all in motion as soon as possible.
Meanwhile you’re also deciding upon the smallest product that you need have ready for this date. It will not be the whole product. it will be the smallest part that shows only what you want to show at this time. Break this down into incremental parts so that you can go from where you are now to having them done in successive slices: each adding to and building on the work of the previous ones.
As you do these steps the team should be thinking of feedback too. How will they get it, when will they get it?
What does early feedback say? Feedback guides team direction. This is where deployment and hosting come back into focus. How do other people see the work? Resolve those decisions early, to avoid delay.
Work through these challenges with your teams
Illustrate the steps to your people. When might the next deadline be for their work? Who needs to decide things to make it happen? What do they need to do, in order to show a small working version of their app? How might they slice this into thin, vertical slices of work?
As you guide your people through these issues, you provide them with experience they can use on all of their future product development decisions. This is the good work.
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.
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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.