Imagine you’ve been given the opportunity to put together a technical team of your own for the first time. Your company has an established business model, but they’re looking for new technical leadership and ideas.
Executive management has confidence in you and has given you the authority to direct your team or department’s resources to provide the most value and benefit to the organization.
On today’s episode of “The Next Level,” we’ll walk through six steps to help you design and assemble your team members, set clear objectives, and manage this team for long-term success.
Joining us to discuss team building and management is Craig Campbell, an experienced leader and the IT security and compliance manager for a major law firm.
Six Steps For Building Technical Teams
- Identify the functional roles needed to fulfill your team’s operational duties and strategic goals
- Quantify the scale–for example, in Full Time Employees (FTEs)–for each functional role
- Sketch an org chart for your team design
- Gather the best people
- “Burn in” the team
- Optimize
Sanity Check
Our Sanity Check segment tackles management questions from real engineers and IT pros. If you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming segment, send an email to nextlevel@packetbrigade.com or check out our survey.
All questions will be kept anonymous. We hope to hear from you!
he guys,
just finished listening this podcast on the way to work and some really good stuff was discussed (I might steal the whole scavenger hunt idea though)…
There’s two points I think that were not covered in the show but might be interesting.
The first is mentorship, in an ideal world I like to see senior engineers actively involved with mentoring juniors (who in turn when they become seniors will mentor new juniors).
The second point was somewhat touched on but I have some additional thoughts on is the mentality (I’ve taking this from some of the courses on project management and how teams for projects are formed).
I believe firmly in the need for different types of personalities in a team which could include:
– innovators (people looking at and driving technology changes)
– worker-drones (nose to the grind doing the arduous repetitive tasks (until automated by the innovators))
– process developers (people who take it onto themselves to optimize processes and workflows).
– communicators (people capable of binding a team of different personalities together to a cohesive unit)
If I remember the management course which discussed this I’ll post a link.
Final though on the communications and millenials, Greg had a good blogpost on this very subject not that long ago: https://packetpushers.net/future-collaboration-asynchronous/
Cheers,
Alan
Hi Alan,
Thanks for the detailed comments! That’s in interesting breakdown of personality types. It also seems like you could expand that from teams to entire organizations. And ideally, each person on a team would embody some of those characteristics, too.