Essentials for Teams
A few days back I wrote about my experience in a team I‘m working with. In that post I focused on the asymmetry in the team, the resulting challenges and frustration because of the large gap in skills and experience throughout the team. Thinking about the situation a bit more I found other contributing factors to the situation. These factors are more on technical side than the ones I talked before. It‘s about the tools the team has available to it and how these amplify the underlying challenges prosed by the team constellation.
The things I would like to look at today aren‘t specific to the project I talked about. It’s more that the situation in the project caused me to think about them. I‘m going to list some tools and infrastructure that I think is essential to (remote) teams. Of course the topic isn‘t new and lots of people have written about it but I still wanted to share my thoughts on it.
What are these tools?
- A shared backlog. This is typically an issue tracker like Github, GitLab or Jira. Don‘t make it to complex, simplicity wins here. Jira for instance has tons of options to define workflows and constrains on entries, I never found these any helpful and at best annoying. Keep it simple, small teams will figure out how to use them for themselves.
- A campfire. Usually this is an instant messaging tool like Slack, Teams, etc. Useful for instant communication where you expect an answer in near realtime. Make sure it supports threads. I‘m personally not the biggest fan of threads in general but for doing „asynchronous meetings“ they are really useful when used with caution. Don't forget to have a “yammer” channel in there where you can complain about things.
- A binocular. A video chat tool which the team can use for their meetings when they are not asynchronous e.g. a daily meeting to checkin with the rest of the team. This could be integrated into your campfire or something external like google meet or whereby. Make sure it supports decent screen sharing. When on boarding or coaching remotely there nothing more annoying than not being able to see what the other party has on their screen. Decent means it should be responsive and ideally have support for the viewer to markup parts of the shared screen. And no ancient tools like Skype for Business don‘t cut it anymore.
- A library. A place where to put longer writings and get feedback on them. While video chat and instant messaging are useful for a quick conversation and getting questions answered quickly, there is a place for longer pieces of text. These pieces of text might be concepts, ideas or rules the team has given themself. The content of these documents are usually long living and something you want to store in a structured and searchable way. Refining a long concept over instant messaging can be quite a pain. Tools for this should allow annotating the text and should have a comment system so that documents can evolve. Tools like basecamp, confluence or other wikis work well here, Github wiki didn't in the past because it's missing a way of providing direct feedback.
- A storage house. A place where to store larger files that aren't source code or directly related to the codebase but still relevant to the team. We often use this to share recordings of training sessions or introduction videos but it can also be useful to share slides and other material like that. Tools like Dropbox, Box.com or similar are useful here.
These are the five essential things I think a (remote) team needs. The exact details of some of these tools might vary depending on how the team works and which ceremonies it follows but I think you will find these in one from in the team. Another important thing it that all these tools should be accessible over the internet, no VPN or intranet stuff.
You might ask yourself why I didn't mention source code repositories or continuous integration servers. I think these are tools that don't extra mention in the year 2020, it's such a basic infrastructure that I don't think it worth mentioning them explicitly.
What about you? What do you think are essential tools for teams? Did I mis any?
You want to join the conversation? Drop me a tweet @dumdidum or email me at kolja@hey.com