Effective collaboration within developer teams is key to creating and improving any product, so who you choose to put on the team—and how it’s structured—can make a huge difference. There are many considerations that go into these decisions, and the challenge is even greater thanks to the widespread movement to a hybrid work environment. To make the process a bit easier and more transparent and to set teams up for success from the outset of each project, it can be helpful to use a visual approach to staffing.
Considerations When Assembling Your Team
When a general manager is assembling a team in professional sports, they must take into account personalities, abilities and leadership styles to make sure the team functions smoothly and can win games. There are similar considerations necessary when putting together a developer team.
For example, a team must have the right balance of expertise. Having a team that is loaded with frontend experience but little to no backend experience will likely prove problematic. Also, a team full of interns or entry-level engineers with few or no senior engineers won’t have the leadership and expertise needed to succeed.
Coding styles are also a major consideration when assembling teams. Some engineers may be “cowboy coders”—coders who aren’t afraid to take risks when developing a product. Other engineers, however, may suffer from “analysis paralysis,” spending too much time making sure the code is as perfect as possible. It’s important for teams to have a mix of these styles so the development process doesn’t lean too far in either direction and so the overall team has the right balance for the project at hand.
Using Visual Collaboration to Assemble Teams
As a development team leader, I’ve found staffing our teams using a visual approach—and visually collaborating within those teams—is invaluable. It makes it much easier to ensure we have the right expertise and coding style on the right teams while managing the fast-paced changes that are a reality in today’s business environment. And with the staffing for each project visualized, leaders and team members can easily see who leads the projects and how many people are on each team within those.
Managers or project leads should be able to see all of the relevant factors of staffing before making an informed decision on who should be on the team or if they need additional support. To begin visually staffing your teams, start with a diagram that—in addition to displaying which team each person is on—clearly shows each individual’s responsibility and flags if they’re new to the team. When decision-makers are able to see each of these factors at a glance, it helps them quickly determine if a team has a gap and needs additional support.
Caption: Here, team leaders can see team breakdowns, responsibilities and if someone is new to the team (Lucidchart)
To make visual staffing even more effective, you may want to get more granular in detail when viewing team structures. This could include labeling team members with relevant attributes such as title, seniority, location, etc. Therefore, if a team needs a senior engineer or someone who’s worked on similar projects, it’s possible to quickly drag their name on your diagram and place them on another team. With this method, teams can see how a new assembly of talent can work together and how this adjustment affects other teams.
Caption: Team leaders can identify personnel, job title and the reporting structure (Lucidchart)
We’re also able to diagram reporting structures. It’s important to know to whom each person reports and how many direct reports each leader has. This helps prevent burnout and ensures each manager has the bandwidth to lead their direct reports and be in touch with the needs of the team.
Once teams are created, work sessions, such as program increment (PI) planning meetings, will also benefit from a visual collaboration solution such as a virtual whiteboard. Before the recent predominance of hybrid and remote work, many planning meetings included in-person discussions in front of a physical whiteboard. Also, voting on decisions included physical, color-coated sticky notes which each person would place on the whiteboard to indicate their vote.
Caption: Developer teams can participate in virtual PI planning meetings for more seamless collaboration. (Lucidspark)
Using visual collaboration will help not only recreate this experience in a hybrid environment but also make it more effective and efficient. For example, working with a virtual whiteboard solution could improve a team’s experience with common project management tools, such as Jira. The right visual collaboration solution can allow teams to pull stories and display the latest project information for everyone to provide input directly within a collaborative space. The result is an ability for team leaders to create high-level plans with both real-time collaboration and asynchronous input from teams around the world—all while massively reducing the slow, manual steps that are so common with collaboration in front of a physical whiteboard. Those slow manual steps could include transferring stories from project management software onto physical cards, moving those cards around as discussions continue and then—once decisions are final—manually uploading new information back into Jira or another project management tool. With the amount of dependencies on developer teams today, removing these steps in favor of more efficient processes is invaluable.
Visually Staffing Your Teams
Staffing teams and enabling collaboration can be a smooth experience, even in a hybrid environment. I’ve found that visualizing how teams work together provides the clarity needed to make the best decisions. It also allows easy changes to team composition should it be necessary. Visually staffing teams allows team leaders to start developers off on the right foot and consistently work toward project goals from start to finish.
