Opinion Our Insights Post 5 mins Steve Sandbach Dynamic Teams Deliver Faster Time can often seem like the biggest problem in project delivery. No matter how much time you put into planning a project and putting the right people onto it the never ending march of time can still bring its pressures as those deadlines get slowly closer. At Indiespring, we have found that the best way to tackle this is to allow our teams to be as dynamic as possible. Training our developers across a wider range of projects and creating a culture where people are open to taking on new challenges as needed has really helped us hit deadlines without compromising the quality of our studio’s output. Here, I’d like to look a little bit into why a dynamic team really can deliver projects faster. A dynamic team is one which works on different projects and on different challenges regularly. This is a great motivation to any professional who wants to expand their own skills and enjoy diversity in their work. It goes without saying that a motivated team will perform better on any given project, and we’ve certainly benefited from that here at Indiespring. A more practical benefit of a dynamic team is that they can share skills and knowledge, meaning that the team becomes less reliant on any individual to solve a certain problem. This is particularly useful during those moments of crisis; when some developers are not around or are working on other projects. You can still rely on the rest of the team to deliver the changes you need, rather than you having to wait for those specific individuals to be free or ready. At Indiespring we invest a lot of time in sharing knowledge, whether that be specific to a certain project, sharing notes from conferences or reading or discussing the best way to tackle problems with other team members. Creating a dynamic team starts with having the right strategy and the right policy. The team have to be ready to switch from project to project and task to task as needed, and their managers have to be prepared to amend expectations regularly as goal posts are shifted with changes to priorities and workloads. Once you have this, however, you reach a point where changes to a client’s priorities isn’t such a big problem, and you can switch your developers time from task to task more easily. This means that you can deliver what your client wants more quickly – even when they’re in a fickle mood! There are lots of common skills within different coding languages and many projects will have different solutions to similar problems. Having teams that have experienced a range of projects and coding languages will help them problem solve more creatively, and explore a wider range of solutions when fronted with a problem. Obviously, the more effectively your team can problem solve, the quicker they can deliver their work. Since we specialise in working with other technology providers, we have on many occasions worked alongside other development teams to deliver the solutions required. This has meant our team has the ability to not only hot desk within the office or work from home but also spend time on site with our partners. This is to support each other in delivering the software solutions quickly and to the highest of standards. This way of working has led to us and our partners having great relationships in and out of the offices.
