Managing technical teams
October 29th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
The Assembla Blog had a great post about how their tech leads supervise their distributed development teams. It’s interesting to see how they work, especially how they use their own tools.
Our team isn’t distributed, so we have fewer communication challenges, but many of their best practices work well regardless of whether your team is colocated in the same room or distributed across the planet.
One comment they make in another post is that they don’t use Scrum Masters – their technical leads fill the role and are always technical people, actual doers and not just supervisers-of-doers. We have a similar structure – each team has a facilitator that handles most of the same responsibilities. The biggest difference in our team structure and theirs is that we have product managers (i.e. the people who write business cases, determine product requirements, do market research, etc.) who are part of the teams and for some of the teams they act as the facilitators.
I’m looking for ways to integrate operations (SA’s, DBA’s) into this development/ build path – I think that’s a critical element to solving some of our issues and enabling faster growth and scalability (both in terms of traffic and our business!) in the future. This isn’t a new concept – or, at least, not that new. There’s a budding DevOps movement going on, and I think it’s a change for the better.
