Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Choosing the right employees and building the right team is crucial in any sector, not just software development: but, software development is one of the only fields out there where the quality of the end product almost entirely depends on the quality of the team developing the projects.
Sadly, despite many team managers and business owners knowing the importance of team building to success in the IT and software sectors, they still don’t manage it very well. Teams often lack synergy, miss employees with key skills, and develop mediocre products.
So, what can you do to see more success in your endeavors? In this article, we’ll go over some tips that you’ll find invaluable during your team-building process!
#1 Create a Specific Vision for Your Team
How can you craft the best, dedicated software development team that will help you land where you want to be if you don’t have a destination in mind? The reality is you can’t: If you don’t have a very specific vision for your team, you’ll end up with a disjointed team without a clear purpose that doesn’t excel in anything.
Software development is a very broad field, so start by asking yourself this: what’s the purpose of your team? What kind of projects are you aiming to take on? What kind of companies are you aiming to compete against and displace?
After answering these questions thoroughly, you’ll start forming a very concrete picture of your team in your head and on paper: this helps guide your decision going forward, which is going to be invaluable for your success.
#2 Be Particular About Who You Hire
Software development is a very intricate process with many moving parts, and when you build your team, you need to remember that:
- Look beyond just one or two qualities: when building a team, some only look for a few qualities: how competent they are in coding, how much experience they have, etc., but this approach overlooks some crucial factors. It misses all the miscellaneous skills that would make a development team successful: debugging, communicating, testing, and more. You need to look at all these skills.
- Hire employees that build off of each other: IT is a vast and complicated world, and no one person is competent in every aspect that makes a software product successful. That’s why you need to fully visualize your ideal team structure and treat it like a puzzle: the team members you ultimately select are parts of the puzzle and need to fit into the broader vision. Without this, your team won’t have synergy.
#3 Balance Cost and Quality
Software development is a highly competitive market and there are a lot of demands for talented people: if you only go for the best of the best, you’ll soon become bankrupt before you even build your first product.
That’s why, more so than most other businesses, you need to be very careful about balancing your costs with the quality of the team you build, and there are several ways you can do that:
- Make sure your ads have a lot of visibility: the more candidates you go through, the more options you have, and the more you can find people that meet your criteria without breaking the bank.
- Expand your horizons: consider remote working and delegation options — both of these can considerably cut down costs without compromising on quality if done correctly. Accessing the global talent pool of developers is invaluable. Outsourcing to competent foreign companies can increase the quality of your product while saving costs.
#4 Create Processes and Systems that Makes the Team More Efficient
You can have the most talented development team in existence with each member having worked for a Fortune 500 company with 10s of years of experience, but this still wouldn’t guarantee success — a team is more than the sum of its team members, it is also the structure and the processes that allow you to successfully get work done. That’s why you need to be careful about how you structure your team and the kind of processes you use to tackle projects:
- Agile methodologies: while traditional methodologies have seen limited success in the space, using modern methodologies like agile will greatly enhance your effectiveness as a team and allow you to handle projects far more effectively.
- Systemic processes: As you build a new team, your team members won’t have a lot of prior experience working together, and such an environment will be the breeding ground for a lot of faux pas. That’s why, as a team leader, you should formalize processes and create a robust framework your team members can use during development.
- Communication and teamwork: communication and teamwork are the bases of success for any team, and this is especially true for software engineering teams. Software development projects are complex with very tight deadlines — without proper communication within the team, success will be impossible. It falls on the team leader to create proper communication and teamwork channels to make the team more effective.
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