Teams Grow Organically
frederickvanbrabant.com
Teams Grow Organically
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: Teams Grow Organically
#2I liked what flashed on the front page a week or so ago, about encouraging people to rant. With Slack specifically, it basically amounted to having a "" channel for every user.
Now that I read the current post, maybe that should be a Slack feature out of the box!
Re: Teams Grow Organically
#3I find the automate csv shuffling example interesting. I have never worked in a place that was this organic.
You can’t just find some idea and do things. There are road maps and promises made to manager and product.
What incentivises your manager to just agree to let you work on your own projects?
Re: Teams Grow Organically
#4> The challenge is that these communication networks are informal, fluid, and nearly impossible to map.
I bet most large tech companies could have a fairly accurate map of the network in less than a week if they really wanted it. Simply look at every email and chat reply between two people and build a graph whose nodes are people and with edges whose strength is the number of those interactions. Done.
Of course, there are a lot of scary privacy implications and I'm sure there are a few execs who wouldn't want anyone to discover that, wow dude_in_power_x sure does sent a lot of chats to cute_indirect_subordinate_they_have_no_reason_to_interact_with.
But if and organization really did want a better sociological understanding of their workforce, they could build it.
Re: Teams Grow Organically
#5This would be a better article if the term "organic" was defined.
Re: Teams Grow Organically
#6I find the automate csv shuffling example interesting. I have never worked in a place that was this organic. You can’t just find some idea and do things. There are road maps and promises made to manager and product. What incentivises your manager to just agree to let you work on your own projects?
I've seen it work in a few ways; these are not mutually exclusive:
* You have someone whose job or as part of their job is to it is to discover these kinds of internal organizational efficiencies and automate them. Something that organically comes up like this gets assigned to that person.
* Managers are not incentivized to stick to a rigid schedule or metrics based on an inflexible roadmap.
* Flexibility and autonomy is built into developers' schedules so they can work on things outside of just their rank-ordered task list.
Re: Teams Grow Organically
#7I find the automate csv shuffling example interesting. I have never worked in a place that was this organic. You can’t just find some idea and do things. There are road maps and promises made to manager and product. What incentivises your manager to just agree to let you work on your own projects?
I've seen it work in a few ways; these are not mutually exclusive: * You have someone whose job or as part of their job is to it is to discover these kinds of internal organizational efficiencies and automate them. Something that organically comes up like this gets assigned to that person. * Managers are not incentivized to stick to a rigid schedule or metrics based on an inflexible roadmap. * Flexibility and autonom…
These sound like good ideas. I guess I just don’t work in such companies and I think this is the norm unfortunately.
There are strict timelines that span months if not years, often optimised to a large extent. There is little room for spontaneity and organic projects to come up.
Re: Teams Grow Organically
#8This would be a better article if the term "organic" was defined.
organic, as in organic growth, is the default, natural growth as contrasted with the synthetic one that is explicitly planned. For example, that means how people prefer to work with there people they like rather than those in their teams.
Re: Teams Grow Organically
#9The office advocacy seems out of place. Extroverts work this weak network methodology well with face time. Introverts are more likely to get similar results from sharing planning and status documents and lists highlighting relevant problem reports. While it may be easier to do this kind of thing by putting extroverts in an office it might be more valuable to let introverts focus on shared documents and reports because of the records that get generated along the way.
Re: Teams Grow Organically
#10> The challenge is that these communication networks are informal, fluid, and nearly impossible to map. I bet most large tech companies could have a fairly accurate map of the network in less than a week if they really wanted it. Simply look at every email and chat reply between two people and build a graph whose nodes are people and with edges whose strength is the number of those interactions. Done. Of course, ther…
I would gladly just tell my bosses who I'm talking to, how often, and about what areas. If that helps me I see no problem, just send me a survey to fill.