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| <mainDescription><p>
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| Good software development teams are made up of a collection of people who collaborate effectively. How the project team
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| is staffed, by either adding or removing people, will greatly impact the team's productivity.
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| </p>
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| <p>
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| When staffing a development project, consider the following advice:
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| </p>
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| <ul>
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| <li>
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| Include people who fit into the existing team culture. Good teams do not just appear magically one day, but instead
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| are grown and nurtured over time. Invite people onto the team who will add value and, furthermore, who will not be
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| disruptive. Similarly, you may need to invite someone to leave the team if they do not fit well with the existing
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| team and they do not seem to be able to change.
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| </li>
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| <li>
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| People should want to be on the team. People are far more productive when they are working on a project that they
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| believe in and want to see succeed.
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| </li>
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| <li>
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| Build your team with "generalizing specialists". A generalizing specialist is someone with one or more technical
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| specialties who actively seeks to gain new skills in their existing specialties as well as in other areas,
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| including both technical and domain areas. Generalizing specialists add value to the team because they have
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| specialized skills that you need, while at the same time appreciate the full range of issues that a general
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| understanding of the software development process and the business domain offers.
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| </li>
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| <li>
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| Include stakeholders. Stakeholders, including business stakeholders (such as end users) and technical stakeholders
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| (such as operations staff), can add significant value to your team. Instead of just interviewing them to gain
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| information from them, or asking them to review your work, why not include them as active participants on the team?
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| </li>
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| <li>
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| Include specialists for short-term, specialized work. Specialists can still add value on an agile development team,
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| particularly when they have specific skills and experience that existing team members do not have. It can often be
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| very effective to bring a specialist into the team for a short period of time to help with a specific task (such as
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| installation and setup of an application server, the development of an architectural spike, or simply taking part
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| in a review).
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| </li>
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| <li>
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| Assess available knowledge and skills. Give people opportunities to evolve their skills. At the beginning of a
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| project, the team may not have the full range of skills that it needs, or perhaps a few individuals may not have
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| the skills required to fulfill the roles they are filling. This is a very common risk taken by the majority of
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| project teams for the simple reasons that you often cannot find the perfect combination of people and, even if you
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| could, you still want to provide people with opportunities to grow as professionals. Determine skills improvement
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| objectives and set up a plan to achieve them. Perform an assessment at major project milestones to track progress
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| against objectives.
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| </li>
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| <li>
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| Remember Brook's Law. Adding people to a late project will only make it later [<a
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| href="./../../../core.mgmt.common.base/guidances/supportingmaterials/references.mgmt_D80619F3.html#BRO95"
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| guid="_JlTPUM6aEdyuBO4ZIzcyig">BRO95</a>]. The corollary is that removing people from a late project may speed
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| things up [<a href="./../../../core.tech.common.base/guidances/supportingmaterials/references.tech_6CCF393.html"
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| guid="_9ToeIB83Edqsvps02rpOOg">AMB04</a>].
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| </li>
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| </ul>
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| <p>
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| Sometimes you will need to go against some of this advice due to environmental constraints. Perhaps only specialists
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| are available (although there is nothing stopping a specialist from becoming a generalizing specialist), perhaps there
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| are not as many opportunities for people to try new things as they would like, or perhaps the stakeholders are not
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| available to be active members of the team. The advice above is designed to lead to as high-performing a team as
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| possible, but even partial adherence to this guideline will improve the team.
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| </p></mainDescription> |
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