It’s easy to work in isolation as nobody bothers you. It still works when you work in cubicle like structures where you speak when you really need to. People need to come to your cubicle to reach you. I may want to communicate through emails even though I know you are sitting just next to me.
Having said that, through experience, we all know that it all boils down to inefficiency, huge time taken to finish a simple thing, long email trails which sometimes never reach to a conclusion, a middle management whose sole purpose is to manage the communication through layers.
Not only software world but also corporate world is moving towards collaboration, no-cubicle culture, team-work and no heroism culture. All that is fine and in general it makes sense also, but as professionals are we prepared or trained on how to deal with humans or different human behaviours? While working with many Agile projects, I could see that problem hindering project success is not essentially technical but soft skills. Agile promotes pair-programming but doesn’t teach on how to deal with certain individuals or the way they work.
Agile brought all these problems in open. Though it’s very important aspect towards team-success but at the same time the least focused. Corporates spend a lot on Agile or technical trainings but I am yet to find companies which focus on improving soft skills of team-members.
Through attached presentation, I tried to bring issues and solutions which can help team-members in dealing with these situations. The presentation may not be complete in any sense. However it’s still a beginning.
Also just to make sure, the presentation is applicable to any team and not specifically to Agile teams only.
Vinay Aggarwal says
Really practical. I too have exactly similar thoughts. And the problem of ignoring soft-skills is much more applicable in India where everyone is just focused on money, power, status and so on.