Team Organization

I Love Cowboy Coding, But I Don’t Run Wild West Teams

March 2, 2010 Management

I love being a cowboy coder. It feels great. Just the thought of dreaming up a new feature, coding late into the night, and unveiling it to the astonishment of the rest of my team makes my heart beat a little faster. I love it so much that I once joined a company made up [...]

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Are You A Bad Apple?

January 12, 2010 Good Communication

You’ve heard that one bad apple can spoil the bunch, but Will Felps at the Rotterdam School of Management proved it. Dr. Felps conducted experiments looking at what he called three “bad apple” behaviors: Being pessimistic Slacking off Being a jerk He created groups and assigned them simple tasks. The groups were paid more based [...]

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Make Your Goals Measurable

December 22, 2009 Remote Teams

Defining your goals in ways that are easy to measure and demonstrate will make it easier for your team and your boss to see your benefit to the team. This is important because telecommuting means nobody can see how hard you are working. There is no A for effort. You need to show real results. [...]

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3 Hours of Real-Time Communication Is Magic

December 8, 2009 Management

If you’re interested in Firefox you might want to tune in to air.mozilla.com on a Monday at 10:00 AM Pacific time. You can watch Mozilla’s weekly all company staff meeting. Mozilla employees and volunteers work from all over the world. When it’s 10:00 AM in California, what time is it for other Mozilla engineers? Mountain [...]

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Don’t Make Your Team Work In The Dark

November 17, 2009 Management

Let’s pretend you’re a director at a large company. Two of your teams are delivering projects at around the same time. Your first team starts a mailing list and puts you on it. The list is pretty active and you can’t read all the mail, but from what you see the team spends a lot [...]

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