Managing an IT team: optimizing work processes

Team management is one of the key factors of a company's success and competitiveness. It is impossible to scale up and carry out large and interesting projects alone. That is why teams work on projects. Only some manage to do everything and get results, while others drag everything out. Let's figure out what makes up a team's efficiency, how to optimize work processes, increase productivity and achieve common goals.

Nikita Rossikhin, head of the project office at RDN Group: “Our team specializes in developing complex and highly loaded solutions for industrial companies: personal offices, trading platforms, portals and integration projects. Today we will talk about effective team management.”

Team management is the joint movement of its members towards the set result. This includes competence management, distribution of roles and responsibilities between team members, organization of interaction, maintaining a good climate in the team. Transparency of processes in this case depends on awareness and acceptance of responsibility. When a person understands that admitting a mistake is not scary, because the team treats it normally, then he is not afraid to ask for help and look for a way out of the situation through joint efforts.

Effective team management is when the goals and desires of the business are converted into clear requirements for team members who are able to produce uninterrupted predictable results. When these conditions are met, it means that the team management is organized effectively. In turn, the team should give feedback to the business, and stable communication should be established between them in order to understand each other's problems.

Team management consists of the following processes:

1. Defining goals and communicating them correctly to the team. The team should understand how the project will be implemented, why the customer decided to implement a digital product and what results they expect.

2. Motivation and reward system.

3. Receiving feedback, having a retrospective.

4. Establishing and accepting corporate culture, the ability to resolve conflicts and maintain a healthy climate in the team.

5. Continuous improvement of your professional skills.

Team effectiveness is made up of various criteria. Moreover, each team needs to find its own approach, be an empathetic leader. Let's list the main criteria by which you can judge the effectiveness of a team:

Team productivity is the number of tasks completed in one iteration. It is important to consider the volume and importance of tasks. For example, you can complete several small tasks (change the color of a button, change the location of a button on a website) or work on one large task.

Quality of work – to assess this criterion, you can take into account the number of errors that the team made, as well as the speed of task completion and the amount of resources that were required to close the sprint.

Team flexibility – assesses the team’s ability to adapt to changes that occur during the course of the project.

Team spirit – it is important that the atmosphere in the team is “healthy”, each team member enjoys their work, and internal communication between employees is well-established.

How to achieve efficiency and coherence in work?

In my opinion, it is important to include agile development tools here. In simple words, when people are more important than processes. During iterative development, at each stage we understand what we did wrong, when we have a retrospective, we discuss why we failed to achieve something.

First of all, it is constant synchronization during one iteration of development between the business and the team in case of urgent issues. It is fast feedback, which is built in such a way that it is possible to correct problems. This allows not to accumulate bugs, but to solve them in a timely manner.

Note that if we use agile development, it is important that the business also works according to it. For example, we cannot come to a plant and start working using agile methodologies if the plant is committed to traditional methodologies.

Traditional industries are more hierarchical. And when we talk about agile methodology, the focus is not on formal positions, but on team roles. That is, a person can take on a role that does not correspond to the position. And if we are talking about a traditional industry, then this is impossible.

Let's take an example: in a hospital, an ordinary doctor will not bypass the head doctor to resolve a problem. At the same time, a programmer can directly discuss certain issues with the business, bypassing the manager, if necessary.

To improve the effectiveness of your team, you need to not only monitor performance metrics, but also support your employees.

To do this you need:

• Monitor employee salaries, take into account how many tasks they perform and set up the correct KPI

• Monitor the mood in the team: support employees morally, use non-material methods of motivation, show their importance and significance in the project.

• Formulate tasks correctly and accurately, which will allow you to complete them faster, as well as avoid possible edits and waste of time.

• Know the strengths and weaknesses of your team in order to assign tasks to the specialist who can handle them, taking into account not only the position and professional skills, but also the personal qualities of the employee.

• Keep up with trends and provide opportunities for employees to regularly improve their skills and take training courses that interest them.

• Maintaining a corporate culture, as it is responsible for the mood of the team, leads to improved well-being and productivity, which subsequently converts into business results through high team engagement, rather than burnout.

Does the influence of trends and technologies leave an imprint on team management?

In my opinion, the main trend today is flexible development, finally most people work on iterative processes. Business understands that there are planned time periods, gives the team the opportunity to complete tasks and get feedback. Over the past few years, this trend has firmly established its position.

Most companies have also begun to monitor the well-being of their employees, and this is where Well-being programs come into play. These are programs that imply that the company monitors the emotional, mental, and spiritual state of employees. This is due to the fact that employees are increasingly facing burnout. I would like to note that the WHO has already included burnout in the list of diseases. Therefore, it is important to regulate conflicts in a timely manner, not to engage in micromanagement, and not to overload employees. All these seemingly banal actions will help maintain a positive attitude of the employee and increase his or her productivity.

To ensure success, companies try to use innovative technologies and digitalize their business. For example, the implementation of CRM systems helps automate routine tasks, make work transparent, increase productivity, and allow working in a single digital space, uniting employees “remotely”. Artificial intelligence, in turn, helps reduce the workload on employees and keep their attention on important large tasks, freeing up time for making strategically important decisions and for training.

Read more materials on this topic in Compass CIO

Team Management Styles

Let's start with agile methodologies. Agile methodologies differ from each other. Sometimes it is more important for a business to get a prototype than a finished product, in which case iterative development goes an even faster way.

Agile methodologies are divided into several subtypes:

Scrum. The main specifics are iterative development, certain roles in the team, retrospective.

Kanban. Its specificity is continuous development, when one task is completed, another one immediately follows, thus there is a certain number of tasks that are always in progress. It is suitable when there is a task conveyor.

For example, technical support specialists cannot handle 20 tasks at the same time, but as soon as one task is gone, the specialist can take another.

In conveyor development, when there are many sites, when the designer has drawn one layout, he then starts drawing another after he has submitted the first.

RAD – rapid application development. In many ways similar to Scrum, but it is more about developing rapid prototypes, when there is a series of product states in the form of a prototype, for each of which the business says “yes/no”. In fact, this is not a finished product, but a product for test operation, as a result of which a certain concept can be formed, after which another development method can follow, for example, the same Scrum.

Basic principles of team management:

• Goal setting and planning – clearly defining the goals and objectives that the team is working on, drawing up a plan in accordance with which the project will be implemented.

• Delegation of tasks and responsibilities – establishing communication between team members, providing the team with the necessary resources to complete tasks.

• Employee motivation and engagement – ​​each team member understanding their goals, value and contribution to the common cause.

• Communication and feedback – establishing effective communication between team members to obtain feedback and adjust actions.

• Onboarding – when newcomers join the team, they should get to grips with the project as quickly as possible. Onboarding is organized through instructions, documentation, and other employee adaptation methodologies.

Team Management Tools:

1. Project management system – Bitrix24

Bitrix24 includes:

• task management,

• scrum board, kanban board,

• communication between employees (chat, video chat, personal correspondence).

For example, team management can be organized as follows: for each high-level task, a chat is created, where intra-level issues are discussed as needed. In this way, information is not lost in some messengers, but remains archived, in case it is necessary to access it.

2. We use an incident management system in industrial operation.

The system allows you to receive quick feedback from the user and gives you the opportunity to correct an error without putting it off until later.

3. A version control system is used for team development.

• For example, GitLab documentation system.

• The Writerside application allows you to generate documentation that can later be uploaded to a resource.

• Graphic editor Figma. For example, business, designer and developers can see the project differently. Figma is used for synchronization, when developers use the drawn layouts, they understand what to do, and impose this vision on the system structure.

Examples of mistakes that can be avoided and that should be paid attention to in order to increase the team's efficiency.

The first mistake that is often overlooked is the unclear distribution of roles and responsibilities. Each team member should clearly define their duties and responsibilities within the project. This will help to avoid confusion and duplication of work, and will ensure a clearer and more efficient organization of work processes.

The second important aspect is the lack of attention to communication. Clear and open communication is the basis for successful team management. It is important to establish effective communication channels and exchange information regularly. Regular meetings, progress reports and feedback will help to eliminate possible problems and give the team the opportunity to coordinate for more effective work.

The third mistake to avoid is insufficient motivation and support for team members. Each team member must be involved and motivated to achieve the overall goals of the project. It is necessary to take into account the individual needs and interests of each member, encourage and support their initiatives, and create a favorable atmosphere for cooperation and creativity.

Finally, another common mistake is not paying enough attention to feedback and lessons learned from previous projects. The value of feedback is that it helps identify the strengths and weaknesses of the team and work processes. By learning and analyzing past experiences, the team can improve its skills and take steps to improve performance in future projects.

Team Management Strategies

To build effective team management, it is necessary to create a corporate culture.

It is important to start by defining corporate values, team management principles, when teams use similar technologies or common standards.

Another important point is the exchange of team members, when a complex project requires scaling, people are added to an already well-coordinated team, who can subsequently leave for another team, and so on. As a result, we get that all teams have a single set of technologies and principles.

It is important to create a single repository of solutions written by the team for various tasks. This is necessary so that when faced with a similar task, the team does not develop its solution from scratch, but uses the current module and refines it if necessary.

Teambuilding – meetings in an informal setting. This helps to establish informal relationships between employees and create a “healthy” atmosphere in the team.

Conclusions

Team management efficiency is an important component of a company's success, which in turn depends on the ability to solve business problems. Solving business problems is impossible without high-quality interaction both within individual teams and between teams. Teams must interact to ensure the company's profit conveyor. If one of the teams is stuck, everything will be bad. Marketing or CEO is not working well - there are no clients, the IT department - negative feedback from clients, management - clients do not get what they want.

Thus, we get that effective management is interaction at both the micro and macro levels. And only such a formula gives a result that satisfies everyone.