Team Composition

Several months ago, new teams were formed and we were shown the proposed structure. I thought there were a few strange decisions.

When there’s a team of 8 people, what’s the chance that you would end up with 2 James’ and 2 Louises?

I swear managers like to go out of their way to be annoying

It’s almost like they think “how can we maximise the communication problems?“

If I was choosing teams, I would notice this, and would swap teams to remedy this. I can understand it might not be possible due to job roles and skill sets, but I’m sure most scenarios could be avoided. I’m sure these teams were chosen randomly rather than having any rationale.

Another team had Jack and Jacqueline. I pointed this out to Jack and he didn’t think much of it… until some members of the team referred to Jacqueline as “Jack” and the conversation became confusing.

The team that I recently moved to involves a third party API which is locked down to only allow network traffic from the UK. (I don’t know why the test API has these extreme restrictions – probably unnecessary “red tape”). It should be obvious to managers that this team needs to be fully UK based, but their insistence of being inclusive meant they still added members located in India.

I was replacing a UK developer who left because he was asked to do everything – because the Indians couldn’t connect to this API. In the first week when I joined the team, I was busy working, when one of the Indians contacted me and told me to pick up a bug fix because it was high priority, and they wouldn’t be able to debug/fix the bug accurately/comfortably.

We had 2 fairly urgent bugs and I was being asked to do both of them, yet I didn’t know what the 2 Indian developers were doing in the meantime. No wonder the other guy left – the team’s composition is nonsensical, and the Indians are always going to use this excuse. I’m sure the Indians don’t actually want to be in the team though, they would be more comfortable being assigned to any other team. 

You would think creating teams is generally easy, but I suppose there’s a bit of complexity to it. I’ve never had the opportunity to propose a team structure. I’d probably say my method would be something like this:

1. Pick the correct number of Developers and Testers, considering their ability and knowledge. Do they have experience in the areas the team is focussing on? Does their job title really reflect their true ability? No point just putting one Senior in the team if they don’t have Senior qualities.
2. Consider their personality types, are there any leaders in the team? No point putting together loads of silent types. Conversely, you probably don’t want too many big personalities.
3. Consider if there’s any problems due to their location (access to networks or physical locations, consider time differences).
4. Consider how well people get on:
   1. If you have people who are really close and are productive, then it’s most likely a good idea to keep them together.
   2. Conversely, people that have caused conflicts in the past could be placed in separate teams. No point risking extra tension.
5. Try and avoid having similar names. This gets confusing in both written and spoken communication. 
6. You may be limited when people can start working in the new team. Presumably everyone is already working on something and will need to transition.