As companies embark on ambitious cloud-native transformations, leveraging bleeding-edge technologies that push products and engineers alike to their limits, it’s key to focus on building highly effective engineering teams.
Source: Deloitte
A blog post by Paul Reddan, Cloud Engineering manager at Deloitte Consulting LLP.
As companies embark on ambitious cloud-native transformations, leveraging bleeding-edge technologies that push products and engineers alike to their limits, it’s key to focus on building highly effective engineering teams. Critical milestones are often jeopardized by a new requirement, some indecision or oversight, or a technical barrier throwing the project into flux. In looking to develop a way to reduce and respond to these challenges, it’s essential to build an environment where people are treated as individuals, effective leadership is in place early on, and the ongoing technical constraints are constantly being addressed.
People are the first key to success
Building the right team is critical from the outset. Focus on finding the right people with the right skills. There’s only so much capacity for learning a whole new skill set on the job when delivering on tight timelines. Don’t hesitate to lean on associate contracts to get you there.
Team needs, individual engineer needs, and collaboration should be paramount. The team must be self-motivated and self-starting. This is especially important in a startup environment, where team members need to be adaptive, able to fail fast, and operate with a lean mentality. It’s essential to collaborate as much as possible and avoid working in isolation too often. Make space for one-on-one discussions, group brainstorming, and rubber-duck debugging. Finally, meet the needs and appetite of the engineers. It can help to assign work with some variety in both subject area and challenge across release cycles to keep their interest fresh.
Something that also can happen if not addressed early on is project fatigue. Running after impossible deadlines and constantly falling short will cause people to lose motivation, which can result in team-member burnout and a disproportionate loss of productivity. Saying “yes” too often to unreasonable or unrealistic requests can put significant pressure on the team and reduce motivation, job fulfillment, and workplace actualization if no adjustments are made. Encourage people to take a day off to revive after tough weeks or months.
And, though it may seem obvious to say, steer clear of a “them and us” mentality toward other groups in the overall delivery. Politics kills productivity.
Finally, celebrate success as a team, and do it often. Morale boosts from small wins or achievements are essential for continued team engagement. Be conscious about avoiding a relentless slog toward a single, far-off target.
Strong leadership is critical
Managing how a team operates and behaves is at the center of completing this type of work. So, in the interest of building a great team, practice strong leadership that both supports the team and leads it from the front. For example, being able to protect the team from and argue down potentially calamitous architectural decisions higher up the management chain will help you in the long term, as much as it’s uncomfortable to address in the short term.
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