You will see hundreds of articles written when you type on Google “How to organise software development team?”
However, you can have a tough time narrowing down on thousands of search results, and getting to understand the actual tips can be tough.
We bring to you a discussion with focus on the points to be kept in mind for organising a software development team.
You might be confident regarding your teams doing well, but make no mistake about it as even the most organised teams fail to gauge the miscalculations.
Being in the management or in a managerial position, it is your vital responsibility to keep teams together, working in perfect coordination with one another, and it is more of a challenge since you have to work with diverse people having diverse skillsets.
Hence, to stay on top of competitive arena wherein turnaround team is critical, not to forget keeping quality intact, divide tasks into subgroups and have your teams to be multi functional and multi disciplinary.
So, how to go about organising your team? Let us look at ways by which you can bring about a systematic approach allowing your software development team to be organised.
What it takes to build an organised software development team?
It is very important to plan in advance before adopting a step by step approach in organising a team in a software development company, for streamlining of productivity, communication, and a systematic structure in place.
For this, you should go through the six ways that would help in successfully building an organised software development team.
Tip 1. Taking right people onboard
Not everyone can be a right fit for particular role in a project and hence you need to hire a full stack developer and choose right people for the job who would do full justice to project requirements.
It is very important to have the roles and responsibilities well sketched out as defined below with delegation of tasks done wisely:
- Project Manager
It is the top most position in any project responsible for the entire project implementation starting from planning strategy to hiring people, delegating tasks, and executing the project within given cost and time constraints.
- Functional Manager
Functional managers are the ones reporting to the project manager and responsible for the individual module completion within the project.
- Business Analyst
Business analysts are responsible not just for gathering the project requirements but also doing the feasibility study and ensuring the project deliverables are achieved on time with as much perfection possible.
- QA Manager
It is the person responsible for handling the entire quality assurance team and overseeing the roles of quality assurance analysts within the team.
- QA Analysts
They are the ones responsible for assuring the quality via constant testing and report to QA manager.
- Team Lead
A team lead is responsible for overseeing the work of developers, designers, and programmers, to ensure that a quality product is prepared out of combined efforts of the team.
- Programmers/Designers/Developers
They are the ones responsible for designing the layout, writing the code, programming the code into the interface for a visual experience, and the entire web developers team report to the team lead.
Tip 2. Always emphasise on appreciation
It is very crucial to recognise the caliber and talents before hand whenever you hand over a project to the software development team.
When you appreciate your team members even before the commencement of the project, there is a sense of motivation and adrenaline pumped up in the hearts and minds of team mates.
Not just your appreciation matters, but even instruct them to appreciate one another in advance so that there is a sense of ice break between them and cohesiveness comes prior to the beginning of the project.
By doing this, you have already let varied personalities hear complement from you and one another, leading to inspiration for performing their job role with full devotion.
Tip 3. Select right team structure
It is absolutely vital to have an apt hierarchical structure in place wherein you tend to have a relevant top down order in place to have no confusion whatsoever with people working within a team or between people across teams.
To accomplish this you can opt for any of the three structures as discussed:
Generalist structure is a one wherein you gather people from all departments irrespective of the experience and purely based on skills.
Specialist structure is the one wherein you tend to gather people who are masters of niche domains with a preferable experience.
Hybrid structure is the one wherein you tend to gather only exceptional people in each domain with considerable knowledge with experience as a secondary factor to consider.
Tip 4. Convey project requirements clearly
Software development projects can become real complex as they progress and hence you need to outline the requirements of the project in advance to all the team members so that there is no confusion down the line.
Outlining a project is super important as it gives a clear idea of how to go about using the time and budget in fulfilling the project not to forget keeping the quality and turnaround time intact.
Further, a team gets a clear direction on how to move ahead with the action plan, keeping the reasonable expectations in mind.
It is very important to gauge the interest of individual members of a team and whether they have the domain expertise to do full justice to their interest area.
Once you have the authority and responsibilities defined, it is all about giving full autonomy to the team, and let them independently handle what it takes to accomplish assigned tasks.
Tip 5. Keep yourself informed regarding project progress
Do have the status of the project progress be taken at every single development process so that the project doesn’t go off track, and team members performing their duties with full commitment and dedication.
Monitoring does play a crucial role in keeping team mates disciplined so that they are seriously performing their task with full devotion.
Tip 6. Celebrate smallest milestone victories
Celebrate every single moment when a project milestone has been reached.
Encouraging your team mates with constant celebrations of even the smallest victories will have improve development team and all geared up to achieve higher goals.
Conclusion
It is quite natural for every team to see difference in opinions and mindsets while working together, especially with a software development team wherein there are just too many job profiles involved.
However, when having an organised team in place for any app development project, web development project, or software development project, there is less margin for ego clashes, confusions, miscommunications, or dominating behaviours.
