Well, despite the saga today that you can read about in my other 2 posts (Why can’t voodoo be real? and The stupid have fallen), the day ended fairly well in my last meeting. I’ll give you just a snippet of the backstory before getting into the meeting.
We do a lot of server builds. And quite a few of them are clusters. So the problem is that we’re expecting to be given a server in a certain state and we don’t always get it. So sometimes we have to troubleshoot something ourselves to get the server to look like we’re expecting. And of course other times it’s just what it should be. So we had a meeting today with the DBAs, server guys, and SAN dudes and all of our directors to try to sort this out.
That said, I’ll just give you the end result so I can get on to the rest of the post. What we decided to do is next time we have a cluster build we’re all going to sit in the same room and do our thing and we’re going to negotiate what each hand-off is going to look like. So the server team is going to build a checklist based off of what we agree on and every server they provide us will look exactly like that. And we’ll know exactly what’s expected of us, and so will the SAN dudes. Personally I can’t wait, because that’s such an excellently low-tech way to solve a problem.
Now, this isn’t exactly a rant, but kinda. Is that level of teamwork really that rare? I can tell you that in my experience is certainly is. In almost every company I’ve been in the different groups have been at such odds they could barely communicate. They honestly forget that they’re all on the same team working towards a common goal. My last job was the worst about that. The ETL team manager made sure his team was at odds with everyone and they kept everything to themselves and never even discussed issues in a friendly manner. It was very acrimonious and tense whenever the different groups would get together for meetings. And I’ve been in several shops that distrusted each other like that.
In fact, I actually sat in that meeting today and said out loud what a strange feeling it was to actualy work openly with another team like that. And it really is. Everything my team does is an open book. I’ve gone out of my way to make sure my team doesn’t hide anything from anybody because we’ve got nothing to hide and we’ll make more friends if they know why we’re doing certain things. So our reasons for doing something and what we’ve done are always an open book… even our mistakes. We admit to them and tell the customer what we’re doing to fix it and how long it will take. And I’m not saying that I’m the reason these other teams are playing nicely, but I’m certainly fitting into this portion of the environment for sure. And I can’t say that all teams play this well together, but I know a lot of them do because I’ve witnessed it.
I’ve actually been saying it for years… Let’s pretend we’re all in the same company!
See, the voodoo worked! Now have yourself a cup of Spanish Coffee. ^_^
The answer to your question is Yes.
I’m sure there are a lot of factors which go into it. What I’ve seen lately in the large shop is that the number of quality people who really know their part of the job deeply is low, so the rest of the people just kind of muddle through. And the large shop is very compartmentalized.
Transparency is a key element – when you have nothing to hide, that boosts team confidence to go ahead and take some risks and also to admit what they don’t know. The respect becomes mutually reinforcing and people are willing to rely on other people in the team. I’m sure some teambuilding experts have a name for that and it’s probably a big part of those teambuilding play days – I always did my teambuilding on production systems, though!
Well said dude.
Sadly it’s all too rare. Even when you are able to build good relationships between teams there seems to be a management layer that doesn’t want to expose their team to any visibility or build those kinds of relationships. This is particularly true in larger shops where folks seem to be very protective of their fiefdoms.
It’s definitely rare. At the Foundation, our “teams” are small – roles are compartmentalized to individuals. And so the Network and Server guy and I have gone head to head on a number of issues because he always seems to refuse to keep me in the loop when he’s doing work on the server. Like I’ll randomly find it off or restarted and then I’ll get an email after I start inquiring about it. But still, you’d figure given that our manpower is stretched tight that all these roles belong to individuals, it’d be easier for us to communicate our plans… but we just seemingly can’t all that often.