22
No, don't even think about taking someone's phone. If they're looking at their Facebook account or personal Twitter account during a meeting, then you have a bigger problem, and the solution most likely would involve possibly trying to recruit and hire the right kind of people; ideally, those who are capable of acting like adults.
However, one thing ...
18
that's a very pertinent question! I'd rephrase it in a slightly different way:
Why people don't pay enough attention to meetings?
The usage of mobiles (or any other gadgets) just for distraction (at least in the meetings I've been to) is mainly because people don't believe the meeting is useful.
So, instead of trying to solve the consequence, I'd suggest ...
11
Command-and-Control vs. Self-Organizing Teams
Should I collect all the phones before a meeting? ...I don't want to punish everyone just because a few people can't pay attention[.]
It depends. Are you facilitating a meeting between adults, or babysitting kids? If you treat adults like kids, then you abandon all hope of creating teams where people step up ...
11
Your asking many questions here:
component teams (platform, front end ... ):
You are correct, that goes against Scrum. If you want to lose time with handover then do this :-)
shared team members
Also goes against Scrum. Multitasking slows people down, makes them lose focus. Good for bad quality :-)
How to deal with a really large and really small team? The ...
10
Interesting question. Before I could take action, I'd need to know two things (at least):
1. What is the impact on the project?
2. What are the duties of the team lead? What is the team lead
accountable for?
90% of the PM's job is assessing the impact of an issue/risk/change/ on the project and communicating that impact to the relevant stakeholders. ...
9
TL;DR
Gamification is inherently competitive, which is contrary to the "succeed or fail as a team" concept that underlies many agile methodologies. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea; it just means it's not well-suited for use with frameworks like Scrum or Extreme Programming. Your mileage may vary with other methodologies.
Competitive Nature of ...
9
Group Discussions Don't Replace One-on-One Communications
While there's a place for more leadership involvement, I certainly wouldn't replace one-on-ones with larger meetings. Especially in IT, this can be counter-productive for a number of reasons such as:
IT often attracts introverts, who may not do well in larger meetings.
Company leadership is often (...
8
Robert Austin wrote a short, devastating little book, Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, that neatly demonstrates why and how most personal measurement systems are doomed be either at best distortionary or at worse actively dysfunctional.
The problem is that you're introducing personal measurement. Under selected circumstances, that can ...
8
From your story it sounds like the current teamlead is not very good at being a teamlead and excels as a Senior Developer. I would suggest he is relieved of the task of coordinating work to his fellow developers and have the Project Manager appoint someone with more personal skills who will likely enjoy it more, ensure that the work this powerhouse leaves ...
8
It's great to hear that Code Reviews went smoothly and you are seeing results soon, you have seen it's effective and that means the junior programmer is keen to learn (All good stuff)
Few things I would like to suggest which can be done at your end
Good code samples from existing code base - You probably have some star quality code in your existing code ...
7
Your interactions with team members are the key part of being a PM. You will always have some sort of relationship with them, good or bad. In the common case where a PM has zero real power in a company, having a good relationship with those who do have power becomes overwhelmingly important because if you don't have someone who is willing to back you up you ...
7
Notwithstanding my comment about the proper exchange, you are dealing with a normal problem of 1) prediction of future performance, and 2) how to attract good employees.
The first problem is a huge problem. Predictive indicators that we tend to use are not that predictive. One of them is experience. Experience is one of the most widely used criterion, ...
6
Treat the symptoms or kill the disease. Taking the cell phones away will certainly cure the distraction problems. I'd hate to think what the side effects might be.
A high performing team doing work with which everyone agrees will not be distracted. It is simple as that. Like others have stated, take a long, hard look at your meeting and ask the right ...
6
there are a select few that cannot seem to take their eyes off of their phone
imho, it's quite common for creative people to get bored during all those endless meetings
perhaps you could change the way you run meetings? I've seen too many project managers who just loved all kinds of meetings and couldn't understand why developers would find these ...
6
What are the key Agile points to be considered in a small startup company, with a team of 5-6 people
Getting started with Agile Project Management
What are the key points I have to consider in terms of Project Management and Agility.
Looks like you want to follow agile project management, but others
may not know what that means. Try to get at least a couple of people
trained. Scrum is the most popular agile process.
Assign the key roles of Scrum Master ...
6
I have no academic backing on what I am going to write as my answer here but am drawing on my experience plus my own predicted reaction if I were a subordinate meeting with my boss and his/her boss.
I can only imagine that the discussion would be a complete waste of time because the politics of such a dynamic would require all three of us to be on our most ...
5
It can be a copout, but in my experience, most of the time when someone says something like "relationship building is a cop-out", the person saying that really does need to put more effort into building relationships. Let's look at some hypothetical scenarios:
Al's engineers need some mockups from Beth in graphics department. Al says to Beth, "I need these ...
5
T think this actually marks you a s good leader even more than a good manager.
This has always been one of my favorite quotes:
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worse when they despise him. But of a good leader who talks little when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: We did ...
5
Help the team to move from storming to norming, see stages of group development. You can achieve this by:
Present your observations to the team. Take care that you talk about observations and not interpretation.
Highlight the advantages you could achieve if you change your behaviour, e.g. get better results by taking more ideas into account, speed up ...
5
How to keep the team motivated
Ask the team.
Chances are, the team knows both:
What they want to do
What improvements to their process would help most
...far better than you (or, most certainly, strangers on the internet) ever could.
So ask them, discuss, and then ensure they're empowered to actually carry it out.
4
TL;DR
I'm not aware of much formal research in this area, but empirical results show that both models can be effective under the right circumstances. Flow and pair programming are somewhat orthogonal in the sense that they can't be performed simultaneously. They also represent practices that optimize for different things.
Different Optimizations
...
4
I do agree with most of the presented, but believe would be interesting to think of the question from two different perspectives:
Short Term: The project, as it stands now, seems to be working fine. In despite of the team lead's lack of leadership, deliverables
are flowing. If that's the case, keep things as they are, adjusting
the rest of the team to ...
4
A good project manager is a good facilitator. Someone who can guide healthy conversations and help the team get to, remember and follow through on their commitments and decisions.
Taking a people focus I'd advise two key areas:
1- Who does what, by when: At the very basic, that's all project management is, tracking who is doing what and when it should be ...
4
TL;DR: Maybe a bit harsh, but get rid of him/her.
Most companies have a defined culture or core values. Suggested is to use your core values in the hiring process. I think the same goes for the firing process, fire to protect your core values.
Introducing Agile is a team culture shift according to the Agile Fluency Model. People blocking this culture shift ...
4
He is usually visiting friends in the company or outside smoking.
I don't think it's your personal responsibility to talk to that guy about it, as long as he attends the mandatory meetings and follows the Scrum process. It is your responsibility to support the development team to talk about improvements in the retrospective though.
In the retrospective, I ...
3
I don't recommend to do that. People are really attached to their phones and they don't like others touching or taking them away. Additionally, even it is a company phone it is their property and their responsibility, which you cannot just take away (it might be a felony as well).
If you have problems only with certain people, you should talk to them face ...
3
I'm going to add my voice to the consensus; I'm not sure how much new I have to add, but I want to reinforce the consensus that this is an extremely bad idea.
Do you want to advertise that your meeting is so boring that the only
way to enforce participation is through acts of petty tyranny and
theft?
Do you want the attendees to focus on their rage and
...
3
TL;DR
Since I've only heard your side of things, I'm unwilling to assume the problem is the individual you're talking about. While I agree that there is a problem, the problem is one that involves people, processes, and change management. It will require you to acknowledge this before the problem can be resolved to anyone's satisfaction.
Most likely, you ...
3
No matter what sort of benefits source-control-emails may or may not bring to your team, they are going to be strongly counterpointed by the negative feelings your team will undoubtedly have from you introducing something which they specifically requested you not to introduce.
If you absolutely cannot live without these emails, then try explaining to your ...
3
The team must address the issue. If discussions do not affect the individual, that is okay; not all are willing or able to work as a collaborative team member. Then that person needs to be removed from the team. This is the function of management in an agile organization. Perhaps there is a classic, head down project where that person can be valuable; ...
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