Some Constructive Ideas For our Dept./Team By: Junshan Li Date: 4/26/2000 We could build a best team if we put out heart in it. DB2 team is a very good outreach to our customers. There are many good potentials to develop the best team in our community and serve our customers constructively and effectively. Here I just want to provide some views on the basic elements of a team (DB2 team as the reference point) and some concrete ideas for the teams of our department. People People is the most important asset of all. A constructive and wise individual could get lots of things accomplished smoothly. A new team member needs to be a person who is compatible with the existing team members. He or she needs to be intelligent, obedient and willing to learn from the seniors. The seniors should be willing to share their knowledge and wisdom. Working in a team is a life learning process. A new member should aim to bring joy and peace to the whole team and make the work place enjoyable. The senior members need to help the new ones to take root in the team and help them in every way they could. Mentor program is a great program at IBM. A one-to-one mentor could help creating clusters and stabilize a team member greatly. It is very important to promote such mentorship. Managers and team leaders need to assign suitable mentor for a new comer. This mentor is like an advisor or a pilot. He or she could guide the new team member to the open sea and sail safely and successfully. Friendliness is a great virtue for a team member. It will help a person to walk a second mile for you. It is very constructive and encouraging. It is one of the retention power for a team. Skills Skills is essential part of our daily work. First of all, one need to have a basic skill set in order to make him or her to be capable to work. The goal is to make new members acquire those essential skills quickly and solidly. Taking classes, reading books, and consulting senior team members are the good ways to improve one's skills. The skill will grow and mature over time if one is willing to learn and put what was learned into daily practice. Every team member should develop his or her skills in at least one field he or she does best. The manager should encourage the team members to develop their skills. The manager should provide means to help them to do so. Team members need sufficient hardware / software to develop their skills fully. Most hardware and software today are very cheap and is only a one-time expense. Without sufficient hardware / software many marketable skills can be hold back from their full growth and expression. The learning curve is usually much shorter if one has interest in a certain technique. People usually tend to go back to the techniques they used to and learned to be very good at. It is too bad to let the old skills go just because of lack of software / hardware. The manager should encourage the employees to grow their learned skills and let them get full developed and maintained. For example, one team member might be very good at Java applications. Another might be very good at web applications. The general principle is that when one is very good at one skill, he or she could transfer this skill to another field, because most applications share similar logic and designs. We could actually make very good use of them and benefit the whole team. Without coding the job has no fun. We should encourage our team members to write code in whatever languages / systems they enjoy. In this way, there will be many experts produced. Each one has their set of skills from not just following the instructions but also to control systems through coding. This will also attract the talented members and make the team perform with structure, automation, and excitement. We are all in one way or another programmers, but gradually we will loss all our programming skills if we only do installation. We could develop good tools to do our business more robust and better. Interaction Interaction keeps a team alive. Interaction may include knowledge sharing, tutoring, having lunches together. Just get to know each other. We should also encourage cross team/department interactions. In this way a healthy and long term network could be established. Through the knowledge sharing and caring for each other, work seems easier to handle even facing difficult tasks. You know that there are someone helpful out there and always able to give you a hand. Rewards and honors could also help the team focused and recognized. Some Concrete Suggestions Work Load: We are definitely short of head counts. We always need a good resource pool so that we could turn around. We are quite overloaded with our projects. The projects are very intensive and deal with many people. It is very tiring to shift gear and run from one project to another, one conference call to another. We need to manage our work load organically so that we won't get burned out. In this way, team members will enjoy their works and will have long retention rate. A tired soldier cannot fight good fight. Workstation Equipment: Out desktop workstation is a machine we work with it daily. It needs to be powerful enough to get the job done quicker, better. Hardware is disposable. A good desktop (with plenty disk space and memory, processor speed) could accomplish multiple functions. It can act as a test server itself (in this way, we do not need a second test server). It is only one time expense and it is really inexpensive. We do not need the workstation build team to build the desktop for us. We could build ourselves using a set of standard CDs. Without a good desktop machine, many tasks could be hindered. Departmental Web Site: We need a good and useful departmental web site. It is not difficult task to build a very helpful and informational web site for our department. We have the skills for it. A good departmental web site for our teams could really make a good presence both to the inside and the outside. Over time it will become more and more useful. Some useful tools such as a digital camera and PhotoShop software will help to beautify the web site and make team members really feel at home. Time and efforts should be given to this undertaking. Technical Seminars: It is a very good idea to have some technical seminars regularly (say once a month). This will keep team members technically fresh, sound and strong. A member might be good at Web, another might be good at Shell programming, another might be good at Oracle. These activities will help knowledge transfer, team build up, team members technical consolidation. This will keep the team members their skills up-to-date. Of course, a coordinator is needed for these activities. In this way we could also help our team members to pay attention to advanced technologies such as Windows 2000, Web development, Oracle, Java, and Unix Shell programming, and so on.