You have gathered a team of exquisite web developers and tasked them with the creation of one of the more complex websites for your demanding client. Each one of them has a set of skills needed to complete the job and complete it successfully. However, it seems that something is off, that they are not as nearly effective as they should be. If this pace continues, deadlines will be breached, and the project will fail – and that is something you cannot allow. It may require some finesse, as agile project management usually does.
Is there anything you can do to make your web development team more effective?
Yes. Yes, there is…
Communicate, communicate and over communicate
This is the base, the foundation of successful web development team. Sometimes a website is made by an individual, but most of the times it is created by the group of people we all know as web developers and web designers. To achieve desired goals, all members (big and small) must communicate on a regular basis. Miscommunication can result in series of mistakes that will make your life a bit more difficult at best, or result in entire project failure at worst. Encourage constant collaboration for it’s a base for success.
Use project management tool
Since all of your work is based around projects, finding a way to manage them is crucial. By using a proper project management tool, you will be able to: collaborate on projects, maintain internal as well as external communication, share documents and files and keep track of the budget. Also, you will be able to communicate with clients, enhance their satisfaction and most importantly, make optimized decisions upon data. There are many tools available out there but only selected few will fall into the best project management software for web developers. Whichever you choose make sure that its simple, user-friendly and that suits your team’s flow.
Use collaboration tool
Managing projects will be nearly impossible if there is no collaboration between team members. Similarly to using project management tools, collaboration tools bring many benefits. First of all, it will allow your team to work remotely, which means that your superstar developer doesn’t even have to be from the same country, let alone the city. Also, it provides your employees with the flexibility to work away from the office if circumstances require it. After that, there is a matter of reporting which just became a whole lot easier: by using a collaboration tool your team can give detailed reports with a few simple clicks. And finally, all documents are stored in a single place, so there is no need to worry about losing them. USB sticks and external hard drives are becoming things of the past as we are all moving to the cloud.
Provide feedback
Always provide your team with feedback as it will give them a confidence boost and keep them productive for there will be no pointless searching for solutions. Feedback can make your team more effective in many ways: it can motivate employees to do their job better and give them an insight what are they doing wrong; it can improve performance through constructive criticism as it helps formulate better decisions to improve and increase performance. Finally, it will provide you with a chance to learn by continuous listening. It will allow you to tap into your team’s needs as well the needs of you clients making you a better service provider.
Define tasks clearly
For creating successful tasks the objectives should be well-written and measurable. The objective must state what should be accomplished and what are the required steps for it. Just be vary that overcomplicated objectives can cause the delay in realization since the one who is the task assigned to cannot focus on a particular problem. Therefore, If you have some developers grouping on the same task, one of two scenarios may occur: rarely – job gets done much faster; more often – you end up with a havoc caused by a multitude of overlapping tasks. To avoid this predicament, you need to set clear responsibilities between team members and break complicated tasks into subtasks. This will provide your team with the clarity it needs to get the job done.
Well motivated, and an interconnected team is an effective team. Use this five tips to ensure your team performs as they should, and you will have every project wrapped up in no time.
