Capturing The Geek

No "I" in team.. or in building great ideas

Sunday 08 April 2012 at 08:04 am

Reflecting on my posting about my early days writing software last night, and in particular my then crowning achievement - NodeManager v1.00, I suddenly felt quite ashamed - this is why (click).

Although I may have written the (somewhat awesome) code behind NodeManager there deserved to be two names on that front page.

As a Bulletin Board System (BBS) SysOp the people you would connect with most would be other SysOps; I still count many as personal friends to this day. One fellow young SysOp I connected with was Edward. The same age it wasn't long before we began talking regularly on the phone and asking parents to drive us to others' house for the weekend.

I honestly can't remember who came up with the idea for NodeManager, it could quite likely have been me on my own or in a discussion with any number of people, but I do know that it took the two of us to build it into a successful product.

Inception

You could easily argue that any idea in history can be credited to interactions or experience that person had; no matter what it's point of inception might be there has to pre-cursor. I have no problem with ideas being owned by a single individual, it would be too complicated to connect the dots backward to events that sparked it, but I do have a problem when those who helped build it - YOUR TEAM - are forgotten.

Looking back through history, whether it be Woz & Jobs (I purposely put them in that order btw), Lennon & McCartney, or Ben & Jerry; I have yet to find any example were it didn't take at least two people to build something great.

Building

So.. you have your great idea and a design emerges, you start to write code for endless hours (fainting on occasion from lack of nourishment - no kidding!), but when you hit a problem that challenges you what happens? You ask the opinion of someone you value and trust.

Rewarding your team

Wednesday 11 January 2012 at 10:30 am

I’m one of those managers who believe your team being involved in ‘the community’ is of excellent benefit not just to their own personal growth but also the quality of software they produce; I also believe lack of recognition of this only leads to demotivate or worse - high staff turnover.

We have several schemes in-house to reward or compensate for personal time spent including reimbursement of expenses to ‘events’ and in the case of all-day attendance a day-in-lieu. I now don’t think this is enough to /encourage/ participation and contribution back to the community.

With this in mind I’ve been playing with the idea of introducing some kind of credits scheme for my team and the comment made on twitter seemed to spark some interest:

I thought it might be good to crowd-source this idea into a more concrete proposal, perhaps one you could take to your company too?

Bottleneck Ninja!

Thursday 25 August 2011 at 2:00 pm

Team Evolution, Roy Who?

I should interject at this point to mention that much of the foundation from which I speak originates from Roy’s teachings on team management; his approach to team evolution and dynamics was quite an epiphany for me.

Identifying where our team is on the team evolutionary scale will help you understand the role you must adopt and focus your attention on important tasks.