Managing A Diverse Team

When you take on the task of serving as project leader for a complex software development effort, there are a lot of challenges ahead. And the backbone of the success of any great software development effort is the project management team who makes the decisions, gathers the background information and makes the project move foreword in a timely and efficient fashion.

To run a project team that is guiding a development effort, you are going to need subject matter experts from a lot of disciplines. You are going to need management from the IT and the business side of the corporation so decisions made during team meetings have the clout to turn into action. You will need heads of departments of every part of the company to be effected by the software solution. And you are going to need technical development people to help you make decisions about the direction of the technical solution and to take assignments for the next phase of the project.

When a company takes on a very large systems development project, that often means bringing in contractors and outsourcing talent to participate in the development effort. If the project involves buying a vendor package and heavily modifying it to make it meet your business objectives, you will have developers and IT people from the vendor and the corporate side of the discussion meeting together to find the right path and to research and deliver solutions to keep the project moving forward.

The only way you can see success is to manage that team setting so these many diverse personalities can come together as one team to get things done. How you facilitate not only discussions but teamwork between staff IT personnel and consultants who are there for specific parts of the project that have been outsourced can be a delicate management challenge. You will need skill, tact and show leadership to make this happen. But if you can get these diverse technical talents to cooperate and become productive as one team, the product that comes out of their work will be much stronger and more robust than anything they could have done separately.

Staff developers and contract software professionals come to your team meetings with entirely different agenda. For a staff developer, he or she will see this project as one of many and look at it in terms of the long term affect on the company over time. The staff person sees the job as their home and each project as a change to that environment so they will be more deliberate but also more defensive at times. The contractor sees the project as an entrepreneur so the goal is for short term project success. Both have a value to bring to the discussion and it is up to the project leader to get the best from both while facilitating their cooperation.

One outstanding tactic when it comes to any potential source of disagreement that could come up during a team meeting is to anticipate that conflict and head it off before you call the entire project team together. This means facilitating your staff IT personnel to meet and enter into discussion about the project and the goals and methods to be used before that first meeting ever occurs. This is more than just a “meet and greet” with finger sandwiches and cookies. By helping highly specialized technical subject matters experts begin to establish a working relationship, you are forging partnerships that will be productive throughout the life of the project.

You as the manager of the project must be able to see the work to be done through the eyes of both the staff developer and the contractor and ease any misunderstandings so both can bring their specialized talents to the table for the mutual good of the project and for the company. By easing any suspicions and above all, assuring both staff and consultant personnel that there is no need for insecurity or doubt about why each is there, you can help that trust to be built.

Before long, they will be babbling their “techno speak” to each other and sharing their specialized knowledge so they find common ground in their love of systems development. And that mutual and respect and shared vocabulary will turn individuals into a team that can take this project to a successful conclusion. And then it will be time to bring out the finger sandwiches and cookies.