Site Guts

Growing People

Leading Individuals

Aspects to be considered growing individuals include:

  • 1-1 meetings - scheduled, private conversation is a space for open and transparent conversation
  • Development plans - working on such a plan is an opportunity to coach or mentor individual person and broaden horizon
  • Learning opportunities - stretch assignments can be a form of effective individual empowerment
  • Recognition - make sure everyone will hear about person deserving recognition

Team Empowerment

Following areas play significant role crafting high performing team:

  • Effective collaboration - within team, with cooperating teams, with stakeholders, with Clients and Customers
  • Blameless culture - fail fast, learn and share how to not fail again
  • Feedback loops - stay in touch no only with colleagues from the team, ask stakeholders and other relevant people
  • Conflict resolution - it is manager's accountability to prevent arguments from evolving to high impact conflicts
  • Resource allocation - scope, timeline and pairs of hands must mach

Reality Check

How do you find out individuals or teams performs as expected? Here are a few ideas:

  • Goals - if you, as a manager, set yearly goals and expectations, meeting them is the sign of expected performance. Be specific (SMART goals) and address all important areas. Assure individual delivers services without incidents, clients share positive feedback, estimates are precise and delivery is on time. Relate personal goals to company goals.
  • Career development plan - up to some career level it is expected individual will develop more proficiency in bounded time. Make sure it is clear.
  • Scrum metrics - keep an eye on velocity, story points delivered, control points. Compare individual results between same role holders in same team, as well as between different teams.
  • Delivery plan - check if development moves as planned.
  • DORA - analyze change lead time, deployment frequency, change fail percentage and failed deployment recovery time. On one hand compare these metrics between individuals and teams, on the other - rise the bar for all.
  • SPACE - satisfaction (surveys), performance (number of merged PRs over time), activity (number of commits per day), collaboration and communication (PR review time), efficiency and flow (longest time per day without meetings, code review timing) - are indicators to capture.
  • GSM - set goals, agree on signals of progress, align on desired outcomes as metrics.
  • DevEx - how prompt developer gets answered, how long they need to think to deal with task, how satisfying are automated tests, how easy it is to understand documentation, how clear goals are, how long code builds to the artefacts, how much manual involvement deploy requires, how often unplanned requests come.