And then there were three
October 1, 2010 4 Comments
I’m 1/3 of a three person team. We became 3 in June and the addition of a third person caused some friction. I suppose that was to be expected, but I don’t think any of us expected the level of friction we’ve experienced.
As such, we’ve had a series of meetings to come to an agreement on how we’re going to operate as a group. Here are just a few of the questions we’ve had to answer in order to become a team.
- How does work get to us?
- What constitutes work?
- How do we prioritize work?
- How do we document work?
- How do we plan?
- How do we account for break/fix work in our planning?
- How do we track dependencies on other departments and teams?
- How do we remain transparent to the rest of the company without double entry of tasks?
- When is a unit of work ready to be worked?
- When is a unit of work done?
- Who’s responsible for collecting requirements?
- What form do those requirements take?
- How do we track work?
- How do we keep each other accountable without hurt feelings?
- What role does management play?
- How do we celebrate our successes and learn from our failures?
- What is the definition of an “all hands” scenario?
I’m sure there will be many more meetings and we’ll end up iterating. The whole point is to begin to come to consensus on these issues. Wish us luck! 🙂
Amber Neill Boaz - Salesforce Administrator 
I hear ya! We became three a few months ago too and are preparing to add #4. I have been craving a dreamforce seminar on ways to organize a salesforce team.
Luke,
Will you be at Dreamforce ’10? If so let’s get together to chat. I’m sure we could learn a ton from each other!
Maybe we can propose a session on this! I’ll post it in the Dreamforce Portal.
Thanks for visiting my blog!
This is a great list! There are only 2 of us right now but we are supposed to get a 3rd. One thing we did do was use the email to case so whenever our users email salesforce@catalystrx.com, a case is created and the default owner is SFDC Admin so we both get notified. It helps us stay aware of everything that is going on and we can easily see what the other is working on.
I will be (although for a few days there it looked like I wasn’t going). Maybe we can spawn an impromptu birds of a feather session. I just saw that Paul Overy (I think it was Paul) posted a similar question on Twitter.
And we just added number 4!