How to make friends with programmers and get them to work effectively? Article by Oleg Vakhromeev

When developing mobile applications, and any other digital products, one of the most difficult and most important tasks is to establish effective cooperation between managers and programmers. This problem is relevant both when working with production contractors and when developing its own technical department.

Problems of misunderstanding of people with different education and with a different approach to work often result in a poor-quality product, therefore preventing and solving such problems is an important task for the project manager and any other manager. Consider what problems may arise and how they can be solved.

Revaluation or underestimation of terms. There can be a lot of reasons: the programmer hears the task and does not immediately understand how many pitfalls it carries, or the manager does not understand the technical process at all and sets the deadline for performing it at random. To deal with this is not so difficult in fact: when setting deadlines and priorities, you need to go through the entire list again and clarify if the deadlines are correctly estimated. If you roughly scroll through the workflow for each task, the picture will become clearer. You can’t avoid surprises at all, but you can minimize them.
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Joining in discussing the details. On the other hand, a situation often arises when, when discussing a task, there is too much immersion in technical issues. And now the manager is trying in vain to understand the features of the program code, computational processes, and the features of the software animation. In such a situation it would be better if the manager honestly said that he did not understand some of the points and would ask to explain them on his fingers. It is much worse when programmers ask a manager to make a choice, but he makes it at random, afraid to admit that he does not understand all the details of programming.

The problem with the documentary management of projects. There are many project management systems: from the simplest to the complex. It is important to understand only one thing about them: project management programs are tools, and not an automatic control system and improvements. If you set yourself a Basecamp, it does not mean that your company automatically becomes as cool as 37signals. It is important to find a clear and convenient for all method of management and timing of projects. It also happens that your team is more comfortable to correspond by e-mail and this is enough, although in such cases more often the work efficiency is minimal.

The problem of remote access. Recently, more and more companies are deciding that production does not have to be close by, but it may well be even in another city or another country. Most often this is due to economic reasons. At the same time, there are actually not so many companies that manage to actively develop, having remote production. Everything is simple, remote production is saving money, but nothing is free of charge, and you have to pay for this savings with enhanced management, control of timings and constant communication on all available means of communication. For example, Skype conferences every evening in this case is a must.

The problem of finding guilty. We really hope that this is not about you, but some teams suffer from this feature. Everybody makes mistakes, and during teamwork, mistakes are often the result of misunderstanding and incorrect communication, that is, it is not possible to identify the culprit, and it is not necessary. However, many managers spend a lot of effort to find the culprit for the problem. It takes a lot of precious time that could be spent on solving the problem.

These are the thoughts that come to my head when I try to establish effective work within my team. Of course, the world is not perfect and there are difficult times in any team, but if you keep this in mind and work in advance to create the most comfortable conditions, the result will pleasantly surprise you.

I would be glad if you share your thoughts and experience in building these processes in your company.

Oleg Vakhromeev ( Association of Mobile Application Developers of Russia )