When work turns into just work it is time to change. I see it too often, i enter a workplace there is 1 or 2 people in 30 who actually care about the product they are trying to deliver. The other 28 to 29 are just doing what they have to do to get the job done. I am not saying that work should be more important then health, family or religion, but if you are going to do something then at least try to be the best at. The more I enjoy what I do the less I call it work.
When I was making pizzas at Little Caesars in America, my goal was to be fast and to make the most perfect pizza. The most fun was when there was a group all with the same goal. When we were short staffed we really turned up steam and really saw the potential. But for some reason this team spirit is missing at many IT company's i have visited.
I have as well experienced team spirit within in a programing team and it was fantastic. Every member on the team was focus on the goal and really want to achieve it in a short period, and guess what we did. Of course that type of energy may not exist always or with every project but it should be there ready to happen when it is need.
At a company I do a lot of work for they had a 24 hour competition where teams got a mystery problem and had to create a web application. The people created their own teams (no managers), and every one pitched where they could to completed the work. Within 24 hours every team had results and a really good time making it, why are normal projects not like this?
I believe that the largest bottle neck in this creation of team spirit is the current project management "system". The project managers today spend much of there time assigning tasks to different disciplines. Okay 14 hours html, 20 hours C#, 10 hours flash. Okay Programmer X you do this and Programmer Y you do this.
Granted at better companies this appears more open and friendly but in essence this is what is happening. I ask project leaders often why is it that I feel like I am working on an island. The response tends to be because the clients want us to work this way. We can't go to the client with a complete FD, after the FD we can't start building without a completed Graphical Design, you can't start programming on the server until the HTML etc...
Funny thing is after years of being brainwashed I actually started believing them. I would say "ah, i am not going to start on this project until the HTML 100% completed and perfect in all browsers". I started becoming demanding, saying like "this page is not designed etc.." . I was no longer focused on the product what "we" where trying to make, I became my role. My role was programmer I don't care what the total result is, I still cared about the quality of my work, but the others well that is there own problem. If Ii am done working I go home, so what if the HTMLer is having a hard time with something.... this is mentality that happens after years of the waterfall.
My ideal world would be this, a client would come in I would have a team of multi-talented developers and designers (the all-rounder still exists you know) all of which would be qualified as advisers for strategy, interaction and web metrics. The client would say i would like something like..... and we as a team would start collaborating, take a look at some similar applications. the designer would directly start trying to get a bit of what the client wanted. Someone would throw a YML generate a database together, or demo some possible CMS's to client. Hopefully within like 8 hours we would already have a portion of the work done, and enough information for continued work for the next week or two. After a couple of weeks we would sit with the client and continue the same process until everything the client wanted was completed.
Ideally everyone would be experts, but I think it would work if only 50% where expert. It would fun to try.
Of course this would work even easier and better if the develop environment was 100% agile and more automated. That the consultants could create an instance of most any CMS with the push of a button. Generate a rails applications, php frame works etc. Automated building, continuous testing everything.
So this is my new goal create that environment and then go looking for customers. I talking about dumping the whole middle management layer. Actually account managers are actually just waste managers, me and friend figured out. They spend most of there time managing the waste in the system and running between clients and developers. In general they keep plannings that are mostly unrealistic and if the plan is achievable then they happen to estimate with a huge margin because they themselves have realized there is a lot of waste in the system.
Of course the clients are as well to blame when it comes to over the top bureaucracy. Today a client wanted a change in an FD. This change was so small but because everyone is afraid every change need to fully documented and signed. a process that take in total 3 or more people and at least 3 man hours. When if the client would have talk to the developer while the project was being developed it would have taking about 30 seconds.
So I am always looking for expert all-rounders to help achieve this goal as a real team, leave your ego at home.
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