Skip to main content

What is a Team?

The concept of a team can be highly demonstrated and understood through watching a music band, where each team member is responsible for his instrument, and all band members are responsible for the whole piece of music.

For an unforgettable symphony, there should be no dissonant sounds; all instruments should be played in harmony and in synch, each in his turn. Guitar, drums and other instruments are each needed to serve a certain purpose, no instrument is more important than the other.
What is a Team?

It’s the same in software, whether you are part of a small project team or part of a big project team, or even part of your organization as a whole, the concept of a team is still applicable.

Team members should always focus on completing each other not on blaming each other or getting rid of responsibility or throwing their tasks to others. Teamwork is harmony in everything, each team member knows his role and the role of others, each plays really good with his tools and experience.
It’s like a ship, where each of us is responsible for a specific needed and important function. To arrive safe, each of us has to perform his role and trust others will do so. The PM is not the only person responsible for the safe arrival of the ship; it’s a shared responsibility among the whole team.
A team is a partnership without a contract. A team is a family, where no one member can live happily without the others…

If every team member understands and believes in the concept of a team, we will build unbeatable teams, we will be able to achieve anything, literally anything in the world. Just believe that the true meaning of a team is…
“Together Everyone Achieves More”
- Unknown author


Some PMs prefer to see it this way…
“Together Everyone Annoys Me”
- Unknown author


which is also a teamwork in the core ☺

Please make sure to choose your team before your destination.

P.S. I once had such team. This post is a special dedication to the best team I ever worked with.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle of Tactics

Sometimes referred to as the Triangle of Horror… where the PM tries his best to maintain his balance while walking on the very thin project rope between this triangle and the Project Constraints Triangle (time, cost & scope). The triangle sides represent: The Team, The Client and The Management Every side of this triangle is obsessed by the sole idea that the other two sides want him dead, i.e. the team thinks that the client and the top management want him dead and vice versa. Usually a good PM gets lost while trying to maintain this triangle in good shape to keep all parties satisfied and happy while making them think they are his first and only priority to get out what is needed from them for the sake of the project. From my perspective, this is a much harder balance to keep rather than maintaining and managing the Project Constraints Triangle… It highly depends on people, their culture, maturity level, and on the PM’s ability to understand this and deal with it in a ...

RPM Technique

I once used a very weird technique with my team to get things done in a short duration in a project that was very far away from being on schedule… For a while I’ve been asking my team for their progress, following up heavily and on daily basis, staying late with them in the office and sometimes staying till the next morning (online from home), trying to dig deeper by developing and testing with them…. And still we were very late in achieving any of our internal milestones… By time, I was empathizing them and I was trying my best to reduce the effect of the pressure under which they were put for a long time. We started a weekly game competition with some funny yet work-related rules, amongst which was “ each member in a sub-team should finish his work before the day of the competition ”… it went fine for about 3 weeks, then the situation became worse… and we all stopped participating in the competition… I then tried another technique… I started buying them either lunch or dinner in ...

The Bus Driver

They took some time to plan for the trip… They drew the road map, bought some food and beverages… and got equipped with the necessary tools… They were going to travel through the woods to draw the magnificent scenes which were observed by their neighbors early this year… This wasn’t their first trip together as a team, though they were all excited… The bus driver was in charge for making the big decision in the trip while taking care of the travellers’ team while of course driving the bus and communicating daily with his supervisor in the station. The map was clear, the weather was very well studied, though the bus driver expected to pass by some pitfalls in the road as there were some reparation in the way. He reported this to his supervisor and requested to take some more supplies just in case they have to camp one or two days more, but the supervisor refused “ the trip has to be completed on time and the painting should be ready for sale by the end of the week ” Anyways, ...