Conference:March 6-8, 2017
Workshops:March 9-10, 2017
Presentation: Building a High Performing Team
Location:
- Whittle, 3rd flr.
Duration
Day of week:
- Tuesday
Level:
- Intermediate
Persona:
- CTO/CIO/Leadership
Key Takeaways
- Influencing people to work together toward the same goal requires skill in today’s world of software development
- Learn actionable techniques that help you understand your team members in the work environment to build high-performing teams—whether you’re in a leadership role or not
- Practical tools that you can take away and apply to your team right away to improve team cohesion and performance
Abstract
As software architects, we often focus on the technical side to building software including key platform or design decisions, or finding reasons to use the latest and great technologies. We forget that software is built by people, and without considering how people work together, architectural visions are wasted. In this talk, we will explore why and how architects should care about well-functioning teams and look at the tools and techniques architects can use to build high-performance teams.
Interview
I currently have two main focus areas. The first is client-side work, where I’m helping a client through a transformation. They are looking at more modern digital technologies, practices and team structures as well as help with legacy architectures. The technology is very much coupled to the people, which leads to my second focus: building technical leadership in our industry. I often see a gap when people move into architecture roles—there’s the leading side, and there’s the technical leadership side, the former is often overlooked or given little support. When working with people, you need everyone on the team contributing in the right direction.
As architects, we sometimes forget how to transfer information to other people successfully.
In today's world of software we work with a multitude of different technologies, tools and tech stacks—meaning we also have many different skill sets and personalities. When thinking about all those different skill sets and trying to get everyone to agree on a direction—success more often than not, comes down to influencing people to work together.
The topic of my talk is about building great teams. One of my frustrations is how organizations typically do team building. They send people out, have a fun day go-karting or doing high ropes or similar together, completely out of that work environment. While it’s nice to get to know your team on a personal level—I find this the least effective method for building teams.
My favourite technique is to talk to people about their priorities, strengths, gaps. I find through this process people open up and begin to understand people more in a work environment. You might be making assumptions about people that aren't correct, they might have strengths in areas you have weaknesses. Understanding people’s working preferences gives everyone a better chance at working together collaboratively.
Everyone can benefit from this. Particularly people in leadership roles—architects and engineering managers. The talk will help you create the right environment to instigate team building ideas, and also help identify where things might not be working currently, as well as offer tools to get things back on track.
The talk will share a number of ideas that you can apply with your team, that don't take too much time. These are exercises and practical tools that you can run to get to know each other a bit better, and work better as a team.
Most hyped is probably Serverless. It can be could be quite disruptive, my only concern is Serverless is pretty much only Amazon Lambda. There's a lot of coupling that a lot of people don't realize they're buying into. There are other cloud groups on the edge of offering something, however Amazon Lambda is the one everyone is gravitating to. One of the biggest challenges is architecting software for change, and it’s important not to be too coupled to that one platform. While this tech is the one that will be most disruptive, it's the one that will have a lot of backlash when we fast forward say two years when people aren't too happy with the cost of Amazon for example.
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