Pay it Forward, Let Your Development Team Invest on Self Improvements and System Improvements
In a fast moving business world these days, sometimes it can be difficult to remember that a development team may sometime need to be “off the tools”. Lots and lots of people in leadership positions such as scrum master, product manager, project manager and many more forget this. Due to factors such as looming deadlines, budget and pressure from stakeholders, we can actually push the team too much that they do not have time to do anything else.
Some would say “but isn’t development what we are paying our development team for?”. The thing that we need to realize is that we are paying them to do quality development work, but we as leaders need to enable them to do so. The way to enable them can be as simple as doing these points below:
- Give time and budget for the team to do some self-improvements. This can be activities like going to a conference, attending training sessions both face to face or online.
- When a person goes to a training, make sure that you have a culture that says that it’s part of being at work. Too many times I have seen that going to a training session is viewed as a holiday. It’s not cool as going to trainings and conferences can be more exhausting than normal work.
- Allow time to beef up automation tests. This is something that is normally chopped off first when the project deadline is looming. I learned that this is not a good idea, when deadline is looming the automated tests need to be as robust as it needs. This means that the team can make changes quickly and confidently rapidly without fearing of breaking anything.
- When time permits, such as in-between projects, allow the team to address technical debts. Within a development team there must be some desire to refactor some parts of the system. Giving some time to address this will pay it forward and reduce further complexities. So stop giving random bugs to fix when a developer doesn’t have anything substantial to pick up, pay that technical debt instead.
- Invest on technical best practice. Sometimes doing the right thing like infrastructure as code can take slightly longer for development, especially when there are some learning curves. If you can afford it (and you would make an effort to) this is a good investment that will pay overtime. It’ll make further development and production maintenance much easier.
So, what do you think? I hope that paying forward by letting your development team pay it forward sounds like a good idea for you and your team. As always, feel free to leave some comments here.