Team management

Cooperation via communication

The UMP is defined to emphasize team members' cooperation: the critical factor for project success. Software development is considered as interacting processes of:

• Capture (requirements, ideas, solutions, etc.)
• Experimenting & inventing
• Designing
• Building
• Evaluation

Alistair Cockburn: think of software development as it is as a resource — limited, cooperative game of invention and communication instead of engineering activity.

UMP provides a method for convenient recording of the the communication items and facilities for navigation through records.

Risks

• It is easy to be stuck in an endless discussion (or spam). To avoid this the communication must be thoroughly planned:

• Communication opportunities (e-mail, web-site, etc.) for the different project participants.
• Communication rules: who may communicate to whom and who may not.
• Problem resolution process: sets the timeframe. To achieve a specific agreement within the specified timeframe, a facilitator should be assigned, who would lead the discussion and act as an arbiter in reaching a decision.
• Planned and extraordinary communications. Any case of extraordinary communication should be related to the project's planned task.

Communication items

These items are not only formatted documents (or oral messages & discussions, as the word “communication” suggests), but also raw materials: drawings, sketches, short descriptions (often handwritten), speeches, videos, photos, etc.

Benefits:

• Speed of communication
• Less efforts for communication.

Risks:

• Handwritten notes, live video and speech contains too mach trash, inaccuracies, and all that. It would require time for refinements (but probably this could be done by less expensive and qualified specialists, or even automated).
• A written communication item means thinking it over — a more accurate and unambiguous approach (provided the team's common language is used).

Team conventions

UMP requires establishment of the team conventions or consensus (SDP, other project-wide rules), which team members must follow unwaveringly.

Disagreement should be resolved like any other problem, according to the UMP problem resolution activity.

Simple rule: a team member must follow the conventions or leave the project.

Team motivation

The team perception that they create a solution to an important problem should be established: all team member's tasks should be directly related to the important business & quality requirements, stated in Product Business Specifications and software requirements documents. All team members should understand the stakeholders' needs and business problems to be solved by the project.

It should be clearly understood that the project would be successful only when the participants (technical, business and creative people):

• Are mutually respectful and
• Understand that they work together to accomplish something smart.