What if, instead of hiring individual developers, companies could hire a highly productive team of developers?
My company has the dream that we could create such a team. How? Starting is simple:
- Get a bunch of people who want to work together
- Find a name
Now comes the hard part:
- Make sure they can actually ship code in production every two weeks
So I embark on a journey with PyXtreme. We already know each other, a few of us have worked together. During next few weeks, we’ll do everything we can to form a really productive team. And there’s only one way we see to achieve it: we’ll work together and execute a project.
According to Tuckman, a team can only be productive once it goes through the following steps:
Forming – unclear role and responsibilities, vague objectives, no purpose
Storming – decisions are hard to make, cliques, factions and power struggles
Norming – strong commitment and unity, clear role and responsibilities, respect, constructive criticism is possible
Performing – shared vision, focus, autonomy, productivity
Every team goes through all these steps for each project. By hiring a team, you can go through the first three phases and have a performing team as fast as possible. Each project has at least one new team member (the client) that forces the team to go back to the forming phase. We can work on a standalone project. Or we could be part of a bigger team to bring your collaborators up to speed with Agile methods and engineering practices. Collaboration through immersion.
Technology is not the main challenge of a project, forming the right team is. By learning to work together beforehand, we believe we can quickly attain greater productivity.
We know each other. We trust each other. We have a common vocabulary for our project and technological environment. We’re a real team and we’re eager to find a project to work on.
What do you think about our approach? Contact us and we’ll talk.
PS: Thanks to Nicolas for helping with this post
