iota-community / IOTA-eXperience-Team

The IOTA Experience Team is a top-level team in the IOTA Project focused on community-facing efforts.
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[Experience] A personal story about distributed team consensus and efficiency #16

Open sascha1337 opened 3 years ago

sascha1337 commented 3 years ago

I wanted to share with you a story that might also be interesting to be read here, would like to hear your feedback of this kind of concepts and if some ideas or concepts like this could possibly also help for X-Teams and our productivity working together with many people having different skills :)

https://github.com/einfachiota/rust-learning-group/issues/10#issuecomment-777922826

Daily mini updates of honest and realistic communication of progress, but also clearly speaking up if something is throttling you, or slowing down the generic progress, can work really well like magic - i support this kind of idea

i would like to share some personal, very impressive Experience i've had at business school that showed me the importance of smart handling projects together in a team can have insanely huge impacts. Also interesting for the X-Teams repos.

I remember from business school, i have been picked out of the class and been send 2 weeks to Campus in Viborg, Denmark, where the "Teacher" appeared ONE time on the first day, explained us scrum, told us the protocol, told us what we should have finished within 2 weeks from now.

Interesting part here was, that the Teacher just left the room and said - YOU guys together are the team, you guys have to finish this, i will not be there for questions, or any help the next two weeks. We thought, _no way, two weeks onlx, people from 7 different countries and nobody ever using Android SDK without a Teacher leading us daily, IMPOSSIBLE - everyone thought with Questionmarks in all of our heads.

This really innovative teacher was right and it worked. Simply by doing those mini updates from everyone in the morning, in a QUICKEST and honest rundown way possible, MAXIMUM 5 minutes for each participant, we SUCCEEDED! Just telling to the Team every morning:

1) What progress been established the day before and if his Sprint can be on time 2) highlighting potential issues for the projects goal to be finished in X days left,
3) being honest if they are stuck, have blockades or do not have the skills to bring the need progress to that part of the App 4) alternative tasks ideas where this person think he could get work done much faster, that are needed to be done anyways.

So we, the team, moved people that clearly were not great coders for example , out of that useless timewasting and just let the Team together reevaluate quickly their task assignment - and let him translate all the Texts and App Strings in those 7 Languages instead - we gonna need them anyways, we knew. Instead getting stuck in unrealistic deadlines / sprints that are impossible, to take out the "virtual pressure", keeping the Team motivated based on REALISTIC goals and sprints, while people were not afraid to speak up about doubts, was really great, easy, did not cost us much time,

And due to those fine adjustments that we automatically made daily to increase productivity, only one hour discussing in the morning , everyone was were up2date of everyones progress and problems, this made us finish the product easily.

A wonderful example that those kind of agile team management and efficient solutions while staying realistic instead rushing under pressure for nonrealistic goals, even WITHOUT having a any direct Leader but a common consensus and protocol everyone follow, can make things possible and happening that seemed previously impossible.