Discover five characteristics of team processes that can save your sanity, improve your relationships, and let your team take pride in being a well-oiled machine.
More like this
Have you ever sent your developers second, third, or fourth reminders about team processes? Did you wonder when you stopped being their respected peer and became a micromanager – or worse, a nagging parent?
New team leads can find themselves spending significant time enforcing adherence to processes they know are needed. It’s tempting to complete small but important tasks for your developers when the alternative is seeing your interactions with them devolve into mutually frustrating diatribes on process. Either choice ultimately leads to decreased team autonomy and wastes time that your processes were supposed to free up for higher leverage activities.
In this session, Antonia shares her journey from frustration to freedom. She reflects on the reasons her team resisted process, her attempts at turning things around, and the five characteristics of self-sustaining processes she discovered along the way:
- Minimally invasive: find the smallest ask you can make of your team. What can you automate (or give up) to minimize cognitive load?
- Self-healing: borrow from coding tools like linters to flag process violations as soon as they happen and suggest remediation steps
- Transparent: develop automated systems that show their work, to help team members understand how their actions impact the process
- Socially reinforcing: encourage people to take responsibility for a shared system with a touch of social pressure
- Worth it: demonstrate the value you create with the time and energy you save
We will explore the case study of a mostly-automated project tracker that saves team leads and developers hours of busywork every week and has become so successful that it is now being implemented company-wide. You will walk away with ideas on how to apply the principles from the case study to processes in your organization that need a little push.
Key takeaways
- How to evaluate which processes are worth investing in
- Five characteristics of self-sustaining processes: Minimally invasive, self-healing, transparent, socially reinforcing, worth the investment
