Well-mixed teams can develop new products faster

eWorld – BooksColumns – Books 2 Byte Well-mixed teams can develop new products faster D. Murali Real-life examples drive home the point..

How do you establish trust in international projects? Sample this, from International Project Management by Kathrin Kster (www.sagepublications.com): “A US-American project manager invited his Asian team members to where he was located in the USA on the East Coast. Instead of dining out with them in a high-class restaurant, he took them along to hockey and baseball games where they all had hot dogs and beer.”

For the team members, this was a unique experience that they enjoyed very much, the author narrates. “They could observe their team leader in a totally different environment and thus got to know him a bit better.”

She explains that the challenge for the project manager is to establish trust within a very short timeframe, compared for instance with the more gradual development of trust between colleagues in an operational department. However, the development of trust does need some time, Kster adds.

“It is not a one-off event, but a reiterative process that is especially important for teams with a majority from relationship-oriented and diffuse cultures. These people prefer to work with `friends,’ not only `colleagues.’”

At times, people from close geographies can be worlds apart, as in a `mini case’ about a team of Italian and German consultants working in Italy for an Italian customer on a new software solution for the service industry. “The German consultants, commuting between Italy and Germany, were experienced in managing international customers, but did not have first-hand experience in Italy. For the Italian colleagues and customer, it was the first time a non-domestic party had been involved.”

The differences within the team showed up at the project start, the book recounts; the rough cost estimates of the German side turned out to be nearly 40 per cent higher than the fixed price that the Italian side of the team had quoted to the customer!

During the implementation phase, again, there were differences. “The Germans reported their travel costs to the Italian project manager in the form of Excel files containing all details. They got a bit irritated when they noticed that a local internal controller was going through all the figures in detail to cross-check them, asking for invoices and more details.” To establish trust, the Germans showed their invoices and explained the arrangements with the travel agent, continues Kster. “But nothing would convince their Italian colleagues who still assumed that the Germans were not honest. .”

Among the trust-building techniques that the author recommends is the bonding of the project team and protecting it against conflicts with superiors. By assuming the role of a `shock absorber,’ the project manager takes the criticism from superiors and channels this in a modified and tailored way to the people in the team, she notes.

Another technique is to provide context. “Anybody will have more trust in given tasks when he or she knows the reason for and background to this task. You can only expect people to do certain things or to follow certain guidelines when they understand the reasons why they should do this.”

Teams with diverse stakeholders are more efficient if they can mutually acknowledge their differences, Kster advises. She sees value in `fusion,’ whereby all members try to cherry pick what works best in their traditional ways of doing things and fuse these styles to create synergies from diversity.

An example in the book is of a Chinese-German mixed product development team. In China, product developers such as mechanical or electrical engineers tend to have a pragmatic view of what the customer needs and how to design it in a simple, fast way which leads to quick and cost-efficient product development, writes Kster. She adds, though, that the pitfall might be that products will tend to be more difficult to repair due to a non-transparent development process and the lack of a proper conception phase.

A book that can help foster productive collaboration in global project teams.

Four models of software evolution

Beginning with mobile Linux, Professional Ubuntu Mobile Development (www.wileyindia.com) covers topics such as power management, application development, packaging, theming, kernel fine-tuning, testing and so on, all aimed at developers interested in `a practical, hands-on way of learning development on mobile devices.’

However, the authors Ian Robert Lawrence and Rodrigo Cesar Lopes Belem concede that some of things in the book might change by the time you read them because the scope of Ubuntu is large and the mobile project is so new.

They aptly cite The Moving Target Problem, an article published by The North-China Herald on August 28, 1909. It was on `the growing popularity of moving targets at the expense of the bull’s-eye when training riflemen.’ This was much to the chagrin of the military, which maintained that the best riflemen in actual warfare would be the one who had had careful training on the bull’s-eye and had from his earliest career sought to observe and then rectify his errors in marksmanship, the authors add.

They advise that the most important thing when developing for an embedded device is to have a development environment set-up. “Once this is done, it is possible to develop, package, and test your application in an environment that provides a reasonable approximation of a real device.”

The chapters – which are the result of real-world situations in mobile device development and `customixation,’ as the authors describe – can help you `when deadlines are looming’!

Drawing inspiration from the works of natural philosophers, a chapter titled `mobile directions’ speaks of four models of software evolution, viz. Darwin, Mendel, Mayr, and Frankenstein. Applying the Darwin Model helps explain why more people use Windows than DOS, why Linux has become more prevalent than UNIX, and why notebooks replaced laptops (which previously supplanted luggables), the authors observe. “The Darwin Model explains why computers don’t need to be 50 feet long and 8 feet tall.”

The Mendel Model (named after Gregor Johann Mendel, considered the Father of Modern Genetics) is about `best of breed’ outcomes. Linux-based distributions are careful, selective, scientific, and personalised works of many people individually `breeding’ their own distributions, write Lawrence and Belem.

Enrnst Mayr, the evolutionary biologist whose work `revealed the intricacies of adaptation and multiplication of species,’ is the name behind the third model, because his work `harmonised and connected the work of Darwin and Mendel.’

Mayr’s theories built bridges rather than walls, the authors find. The third model is about the coexistence of diverse Linux distributions.

And, the fourth model is based frighteningly on Mary Shelly’s `Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus,’ an 1818 novel about a scientist bringing horror to life!

Similarly, outcomes can sometimes, despite the best of intentions, come up short of original expectations, the authors caution.

“These are the projects that don’t end well for anyone. Yet, the code still lives on. If there is a lesson to be learned, Frankenstein the scientist puts it this way: `Peace! Peace! Learn my miseries, and do not seek to increase your own.’”

For the avid tech professionals.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

The Happy Kennel

Well-mixed teams can develop new products faster

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