An Average Project Team

Development teams are nothing else a collection of people with a certain specialization and all of them with a common goal; to complete the project. At the head of the project is theProject Manager. Why? Because the PM is responsible for the project.

Surrounding the PM, we have the so called inner circle; that’s a name for the people, who have his confidence and are willingly and able to handle their responsibility. The organization is in its self flat, no clear manager in his office, but everyone in jeans and share the working space of the project.

Depending on the type of design for the project, the budget and the type of product, the development team will be hired in stages. Almost each project has the need (as first people hired for the project) of:

1. Secretary/Administrative person – This person is finally responsible for handling all administrative activities and that’s really a lot. The secretary is involved in building the requirements, taking care for all the documentation, the handling (and collecting) of statistical data, manage appointments, meetings, and much more.
2. QC Manager – The QC manager is in charge of the quality control of the project and it is an excellent idea to get such person involved from the beginning.
3. Designer – This can be the project manager, but for large projects, we have one or more designers for the projects. This designer is not (only) a theoretician, but a more practical person (as well).
4. Design – Graphical designer (assuming that the product has GUI (Graphical User Interface)). The graphical designer is also the person many times used to create the requirements together with the customer.
5. GUI developer – this developer is needed when the product contains GUI. Together with the graphical designer, secretary and designer, he or she developers only the graphical screens in a programming environment (like JDK, Jboss, SE,JBPM, Eclipse, GWT, J2ee, JSP, EXTJS, Hibernate, Visual Studio, etc.)

That’s the start of the project and this is the team I start with (mostly).

It’s a mixture of different professional disciplines and I love it; we have creative, technical, administrative and practical oriented people collected in one place and work on a common thing, to produce a product.

How to hire the right people

When I hire the people of a project, I need normally a HR person (or company). If the expected people in the project will not succeed more then 20 people, we better can use an external HR company, otherwise we hire one or more HR people.

The problem with HR people is, that they do know their Human Resources business, but they have absolutely no idea about the project and its contents.

What do I do in such situation (which is always the same)? Simple, I use the HR company to screen the first wave of resumes, to administer and organize them. Then I take over.

I personally am never interested in how much a possible candidate knows, but I’m interested in his or her character, the intentions, the experience and possible compatibility issues and the abilities of handling stress and responsibilities. Those factors are much more important then actual knowledge, because in Israel it is extreme rare to find the proper educated and experienced professional in the IT industry. After I found the right people, I start training them myself.

For choosing people, I’m not interested in race, gender, age, how he or she looks like and what clothes the person is wearing; I don’t care about those things; I’m very much interested if the person has the ability I can use in the project and if that person lives in an igloo, bungalow, castle, ruin, tent, street, or in a ‘normal’ apartment, I really don’t care.