In his famous book, Good to Great, Jim Collins discussed the importance of putting “Who” before “What.”
Collins
investigated how 11 American companies became the most successful in their market segments. He showed that the
main factor of their success was not setting a new direction or articulating a fresh corporate vision but
getting
the right people in the right seats. Therefore, team member selection and human resource management are
cornerstones of the Danavero Dedicated Team approach.
Every team in its life-cycle passes several stages, and one of the most popular models that describes this
process is Tuckman's stages of group development. The model includes 4 stages of team development: Forming,
Storming, Norming, and Performing. Every stage characterizes its own efficiency:
The goal of Danavero’s Dedicated Team model is to reach the maximum possible performance at every stage of
team
development. In general, it means effectively forming a team, quickly and painlessly passing the Storming and
Norming stages, then reaching Performing and staying there.
1. Forming
Forming
a. Project and Team planning
This first step is very important – creating a structure of roles for the future team and job descriptions
for every team member. This step is critical from the point of view of the future team successfully passing
every development stage and reaching the highest performance. One influences the other – if you clearly
understand the place of each developer in the team structure, it will help you to describe the job better; if
the job description is clear and attractive, you will engage better people. Overall, if the job satisfies
employee expectations, your team will achieve maximum performance faster and maintain it longer.
b. Recruitment
After obtaining a job and project description, Danavero’s recruitment team starts to search for appropriate
candidates within existing company employees and on the external job market. The recruitment team pre-screens
candidates and organizes their interviews, which include several stages (soft-skills interviews, technical
interviews) and finishes with an interview of a customer representative.
c. Onboarding
In stage one, Forming, team members tend to behave quite independently – they may be motivated, but they are
usually relatively uninformed of the issues and objectives of the team. In order to build trust and
cooperation faster and more effectively, Danavero assigns a project manager to assist. The project manager is
introduced to the client by a responsible sales/recruitment representative via email as soon as the first team
member is hired. Their task in the initial stage is to gather all important information and share it with all
team members. They also prepare the necessary work environment for the project team, as well as determine
first tasks and the framework of team cooperation.
2. Storming
Storming
The Storming stage is a serious challenge for the newly formed team. In this stage, team members begin to
understand their own roles more deeply, as well as their boundaries and intersections with the roles of the
other participants. During this process of progressive involvement, team members begin to collaborate and
discuss personal responsibility and commitment.
The assigned Danavero project manager helps individual developers become a team. The Human Resource team,
which
is responsible for efficient internal communication and the adaptation of newcomers, monitors the situation in
the team, helps to manage it, quickly reacts to any unproductive situations, and increases the efficiency of
collaboration.
3. Norming
Norming
On the Norming stage, team members clearly understand the limits of their responsibilities. The main task of
this stage is to reach the maximum of efficiency and teamwork productivity. In the Dedicated Team model,
Danavero reaches it out by implementing an Agile approach and procedure for software development, such as
Scrum
or Kanban.
Agile methodologies are flexible enough to be customized to the needs of any customer and provide:
- teamwork sustainability
- accurate task estimation
- team's commitment to continuous integration practices
- automated testing to protect quality of software code
- respond to customers’ expectations
- continuous deployment to get fast feedback.
4. Performing
Performing
On the Performing stage, team rules and roles are established. Group members focus on achieving project
goals,
and they are motivated and knowledgeable.
The Danavero goal in this stage is to make all necessary efforts to maintain team performance at the highest
level, taking into account all possible evolving circumstances. Such circumstances could include, changing
customer business strategies, shifting market situations, new technological innovations, etc.
Such circumstances could be changing strategy of customer business, situation on markets, new technology
innovation etc.
Danavero manages such challenges through a smooth process of on-demand scaling and support, which means we
provide more developers when customers need to extend their teams on-demand, as well as dissolve the staff
they
no longer need. The smoothness of the process is achieved by:
- detailed project documentation
- effective kick-off of new team members
- transparent team communication
- best project management practices
Thus Danavero possesses all necessary knowledge, skills and tools to build, develop, and maintain a Dedicated
Team that will achieve the most ambitious customer goals.
