Practical tips: how to effectively control employees in the it-department?

We all think about how we open our business, how to create a successful company or something big.

I can say, unequivocally, in order to make something big and successful, we need a good team. But how to create such a team? In this article, I will try to reveal how we work with our team, and how, through joint efforts, we achieve good results.

The first thing I want to mention is a large collection of publications on this topic. Many talk about the fact that there is no ready-made recipe and you need to try. I can not agree with that. It is necessary to experiment and even say more, you need to be first in something, then you can get a synergy of an advanced and effective approach.
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I will not write about how to find the right people. It seems to me that Peter Thiel spoke well of this in one of his books. The bottom line is that we all need “tools” in the team, not just “bullets”. Since we cannot control everything, there must be people who are ready to carry out complex tasks and guide people ("bullets"). Based on this reasoning, I would like to describe how you can build a job with “bullets”.

First of all, it is necessary to decide whether you have a project work, and how many distractions are there in projects (support support). If you take as an example the company in which I work, then you cannot call it just project work. Projects have already reached a certain maturity and require support, but since we are in the “web” (in the field of high technologies), we need to develop. And this means: to search for new ways to increase orders on the site, create a unified and more technological platform, introduce more complex and optimized processes in CRM for the entire business, personalize the newsletter and so on. And the logical question arises, how can we achieve results in an it-department in an efficient and simple way? The answer to this question is simple: “team”. The team must very clearly understand which task must be performed immediately and which one can wait. Many will say that the manager is responsible for this. In my opinion, this is not entirely true.

If we turn to flexible methodologies, we will see a situation where managers go to the background. The team itself decides what to do in the first place, and what to leave for later. We can even notice that the developer is engaged not only in writing code, but also in testing, and sometimes even introducing a new product. And this is not bad. It is important to understand that a team is a living organism, it develops on its own, and those who do not want to grow with an organism go into the background or are generally out of growth. In my opinion, employees who do not develop or develop in a great direction are not needed in the company, they will only drag the whole company down. From such people need to quickly get rid of.



What moves the team forward? Of course, this is an idea. Each team must be very clear about the mission of the company and what it wants to achieve. Therefore, the first thing to do is to mark the team with simple and clear ideas that will be shared by all employees. A reasonable question arises: how to start a movement, because sometimes an idea is not enough? In this case, the meetings help us once or twice a month. Thanks to them, all employees will learn about what results the company wants to achieve, and what needs to be done to do this.

I propose to return to the discussion team. After we decided that a team is a living organism that has an idea that makes the whole company move. We must learn to build goals. You can refer to the simple SMART method, you can read about it separately. The main thing is that the goals are clear and achievable to all. These goals can be discussed once a week only with your team. It is important that each team member knows what the employee is going to achieve. In order to effectively achieve the goal, we must be limited to something. For example, an iterative approach suited us very well. When for a certain period of time (we made it a week), each employee must show a result that will help achieve the goal.

It is important to understand that the tasks that lead to the achievement of the result should be clear, even to the kid. Then we can be sure that there will be at least some result. The tasks that lead to this result should be divided into smaller ones (decomposition) and lead to a specific daily result. You can check the results at rallies (daily meetings), where every employee of the SCRUM methodology will answer three simple (and at first very complex) questions: What did I do from the last meeting to achieve the goal? What problems did I have? What am I going to do today, in time for the end of the iteration to show the result?

Usually the meeting consists of a group of not more than 6 people. The meeting should not be delayed for more than 20 minutes. If such a situation arises, it is necessary to devote less time to details. It is better to go separately to the employee and help him deal with his current tasks. In our company, every employee of the it-department can ask for help, and this is welcome. Good effect is achieved with pair programming. Tasks that are set at the meeting are recorded by the scram master for each employee separately in the format: “What has been done:” and “What will be done at the next meeting”. We use Skype chat between the scrum master and the employee so that these records are visible to each team member and you can quickly ask what the task is. In order for employees not to be distracted by chats and emails a lot, we introduced some simple rules:

• We do not use mail at all (if we use, it means we rest from tasks (everybody needs breaks, but it is better to spend them on tea));
• Disable notifications in Skype (command: / alertsoff, use Skype to clarify the task you are doing, setting an urgent task);
• Use the command / alertson [text] in important Skype chat rooms in order to respond quickly.
• In order to not be able to use the mail, all calls to the it-department are first processed by the it-manager. Many tasks at the stage of communication with interested parties never turn into tasks.

The tasks that each employee of the team performs are fixed in the tracker (we use worksection). If the manager or the one who sets the task (scrum-master, product owner), did not find the time to detail it, then the developer needs to independently bring in her tracker. The team must plan their tasks and know who is responsible for what tasks. For effective planning, we use Google Docs, in which each employee can filter tasks on their own. In my opinion, each team member must learn to evaluate their tasks.

In order for the evaluation to have a real resonance, it is put down opposite each task. Assessment is a score that includes two signs: it is the importance for the business and the deadline. An example, if a task is performed in 1 day by the team's assessment (and the employee who will perform), then this task weighs 1 point. If the task is very important in order to show the result, then it can be given from 0.1 and above points, at the discretion of the team. This method was taken from the book Rasmusson J. “Flexible management of IT-projects. The guide for real samurai ”and begins to bear fruit only when each team member understands how important these points are for the team. There is a difficulty when each employee will want to get the most points and will not perform other important tasks, for example, related to the support (support of current projects). In order to avoid such cases, we have introduced a specific rule:
“Every morning we check the tracker for new tasks:
- tasks that we can close within 15 minutes, close immediately;
- tasks that we cannot complete within 15 minutes are discussed at the meeting. ”

This rule made it easy to identify important tasks and give more points for them.

As a result, we received full control over our employees, while everyone knows how effective it is and what results the team wants to achieve. In the next article I will try to reveal in more detail our results and the difficulties that we faced.