Probably Random

Team Building

As I’ve said before I go to Enterprise Tuesdays at the University of Cambridge.  A recent seminar was all about building teams and it seemed to come at just the right time (it was a great seminar!).  I’m trying to build the development team where I work and with all the usual interviews and tests and everything it was really useful to hear other people experiences.  All along we’ve been trying to build a team rather than pick a group of amazing individuals, and the team experience is one which is very important to us, it was nice to see this post on coding horror too.

Our main difficulty is fitting our team dynamic into the company’s infrastructure.  They are very much dictatorial and reactive; we were giving our schedule for Christmas promotions which needed development work at the beginning of December! needless to say it was shambolic.

One of the presenters made a point which was that interviews are a two way thing, it’s as much about the interviewee deciding if they like you.  The management here come across as fairly arrogant, sometimes the interviews we run feel like interrogations rather than interviews and twice I’ve had people ask when it’s the technical interview with just me there ‘is your boss always like that? if so I don’t want the job’.  The people I want in my team are those who were perceptive enough to notice that at interview and ask the question, the problem is… they are the ones who are most likely to be put off.  Not only does it put off those who we want to join, but it is embarrassing as the interviewer to have to defend policies which you don’t necessarily agree with.  This lead on to ‘Hygiene Factors’ where they were talking about the baseline of requirements, we have minimum legal holidays, very near maximum working hours (plus being on call 24/7 and no company benefits until you’ve been here for 5 years… we do however have interesting work to do, which is what is keeping the team together at the moment.

One of my main faults whilst building the team here was to underestimate how much time it takes to bring new people in to the team, get them up to speed with our code, systems and practices (try and stick to conventions it’s much easier!) which has meant extra pressure on me to deliver new work, my own work and improve the team.

Having good, passionate and motivated people in your team, who aren’t all the same but can get along, having a great working environment and an interesting job to do (one which challenges but doesn’t overwhelm) is really important.  As is having a  perceptive manager who understands people and their biases and goals so that the work can remain interesting and challenging.

More Book Recommendations

In the following two articles business people and entrepreneurs discuss the books which influenced them; and they’re not all business books!
Reading for business inspiration
Reading for business inspiration (part 2)

Drinking Batch A

Well Batch A of the dandelion wine did clear nicely and I bottled it up the other day.
Of course that meant giving it a try too, I hadn’t measured the specific gravity when I first made it so I have had to guess based on the ingredients at its inital gravity, but it appears if all had gone to plan I should have ended up with a wine of about 14%, I think it’s actually ended up at about 11% and a little bit (okay that’s being nice) sweet, perfectly drinkable but perhaps just a small gloass as a dessert wine.

No Gold Medal for the London 2012 website

I am a web developer and I have written some bad sites in my time, I know the difficulties and constraints involved but if you’re creating the site for London 2012, the pinnacle of sporting excellence, to be browser global and to encourage people to participate (volunteer, come and watch, write about it etc…) then you want a good website!

http://www.london2012.com/

When we tried this out the other day (OK about 5 minutes ago, it annoyed me so much I had to write about it straight away) there were so many usability issues with it I just couldn’t believe it, especially after the Sydney Olympics site got taken to court over their site! Now is this the fault of the designer/implementers or those that contracted them?   Well who knows?
Who decided that you had to have a ’screen name’ for your blog posts when you register? Am I ever going to post on their site? I don’t dare even try now after the experience so far!  and who decided that good feedback to the user would be ‘that name is taken try another’ (without any prompt towards what isn’t yet taken?) give it a few more months and people will be there for days trying to come up with a new unique (yet totally unnecessary) screen name.
Is my ethnic origin really needed? my gender doesn’t appear to be, I certainly hope that all this is being properly protected under the Data Protection Act!
We gave up after a page with a map of the UK which said ‘click anywhere to start’, where there was only a bit of southern England and northern Scotland poking out from behind the ‘click to start message’ which was actually click-able.

Perhaps whoever was responsible for this (the entire chain of responsability!) should have gone to DevDays! It seems they might have learnt a lot!

So no Gold Medal for the London Olympic website, lets hope this site is, well training for the main event, hopefully they’ll go away and do more practice and by the time people really need to use it for the main event but if the developers (and those responsible for them) don’t show the same dedication as the athletes who’ll be taking part then we could look like a bunch of amateurs.

Journalist, Correspondent or Presenter?

I’m sorry but how can the BBCs Technology Correspondent not know what Ubuntu is! Yes not everyone knows, but not everyone is the BBCs technology correspondent!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/10/24_hours_with_ubuntu.html

Admittedly he’s now gone out and found out about it, but surely if that’s your job you’d if that’s what my license fee is paying for? or is it just paying for them to go to tech shows and advertise the latest and greatest shiny gadgets rather than do journalistic research.