With the current tech skills gap, many organizations struggle to find expert talent when building a dedicated software development team. But even after finding individuals with technical expertise, some leaders fail to put together successful teams. Assembling a dedicated software development team for a specific project involves understanding personality types, embracing discursive diversity, and ensuring team synergy.
With the rise of remote, hybrid, and elastic teams, too many organizations have discounted the importance of soft skills and team synergy. In fact, these factors are more important than ever. Considering past performance, measuring soft skills, and managing cognitive biases help create a well-rounded, adaptable, and innovative team that thrives in today’s dynamic tech landscape.
The first step in building a dedicated software development team is to take stock of your in-house and outsourced developers. In this stage, getting a better understanding of personality types and soft skills will help you later when you begin assembling your development team. Here are a few things to measure:
In addition to technical expertise, track and analyze the past performance of your developers to identify strengths, weaknesses, and potential bottlenecks. Some valuable KPIs to measure include cycle time, code review time, code coverage, churn, deployment time, and velocity.
Gigster created METRX to easily understand the productivity and performance metrics of your engineering teams. The tool checks Git repository’s metadata and the tech stack to evaluate and analyze code and generate customized reports.
These insights will allow you to invest in the growth of your team members and develop training and workflows to account for strengths and weaknesses. When building a dedicated software development team, you can choose team members based on these KPIs, understand where bottlenecks might occur, and choose team members or create new performance protocols to maintain the efficiency of your development cycle.
Factoring personality types into team dynamics has a huge impact on communication, problem-solving, engagement, and overall project success. Creating a software development team with diverse perspectives can improve problem-solving and out-of-the-box thinking, leading to more innovative solutions.
Personality types also play a role in how invested each individual contributor is in the project and how valuable their contributions are. When Gigster built mobile and web applications for a top motorcycle company, we were able to find developers who were interested in motorcycles. This gave them a particular investment in the project and a valuable perspective. It’s critical to minimize onboarding time when working with elastic or outsourced development teams. Finding developers who already have industry knowledge and interest in the company or solution allows new team members to get up to speed quickly, resulting in faster performance time. In the case of the motorcycle company, our developers were able to provide recommendations on day one because they already understood the company and its customers and had a vested interest in improving the user experience.
Measuring personality types can be achieved in several ways. Personality assessments such as Myers-Briggs and DISC can help identify common personality types and traits. However, these can be oversimplified and should only be used as a starting point. Relying on project managers to assess soft skills and personality traits provides an extra layer that can be relied on for future projects.
Emotional intelligence (EQ) measures self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. A high EQ contributes to conflict resolution, effective communication, and strong interpersonal skills. Ensuring every project has some high EQ members is critical for effective teamwork and synergy. Failing to account for this skill could lead to a team full of engineers with poor interpersonal skills which will create animosity, miscommunication, and infighting.
There are tests that measure emotional intelligence across several different domains. This doesn’t mean software developers with low EQ should be passed over. It does mean that these members may need a specific management style to succeed or may need to be balanced out with other high EQ team members.
Synergy is a buzzword that is overused and often misused. However, there is real value. Team dynamics is a measure of how the team operates and how well team members communicate and collaborate. The goal of factoring team dynamics into your dedicated software development team is the increased performance and collaboration created by building a team with diverse and complementary skills, supporting them with clear communication and shared goals, and empowering them to voice concerns and adapt to changes.
A measurement Gigster uses to track how well our dedicated software development teams will communicate and collaborate is discursive diversity. Stanford University and the University of California Berkeley conducted a study with Gigster to measure how discursive diversity affects team performance in the gig economy. The study defines discursive diversity as the degree to which meanings conveyed by a group member diverge from the understanding of the other members.
The Stanford study found that high discursive diversity during the ideation and planning stages resulted in more innovative solutions. The implementation and testing stages benefited from a lower discursive diversity where all team members were aligned on the development roadmap. Measuring your team’s discursive diversity at different stages of the project allows you to benefit from both sides of the spectrum.
The individual personality measurements and soft skills you tracked for each team member are tools to be used when building team dynamics. However, building a team based on soft skills, personality types, and complementary talents is only the beginning. The organization and leadership must then ensure the team is aligned and motivated with common objectives. Clear communication will help increase synergy and innovation, minimize misunderstandings, and make the team more adaptable to new challenges and opportunities. Finally, leadership should have full visibility into the team to be able to support and make changes as needed.
Soft skills such as emotional intelligence and personality types aren’t traditionally used in assembling dedicated software development teams because there are simply too many factors to consider. How well will an ISFJ with high EQ work with an ENFJ with medium EQ? What is their discursive diversity at the start of the project? No manager could be expected to intuit this.
Gigster uses AI-based project management software to give our project managers insights into team contributions and predictive analytics to anticipate project delays or communication breakdowns before they can negatively impact the project’s schedule or costs. Our platform automatically factors in soft skills and past performance to quickly generate high-performing teams. This also creates a feedback loop where each successive project has even more insights to help build better, dedicated software development teams.
Focusing on both technical and soft skills, and using technology to organize and quantify these metrics, allows Gigster to assemble dedicated software development teams in days instead of weeks or months. These teams have much higher success rates delivering custom software development services because they are built with past performance data and team synergy top of mind.
If your organization would like to benefit from our development teams, learn more about Gigster Talent on Demand. We provide fully managed software development teams and staff augmentation to help find teams or individuals to fit perfectly into your existing development resources. Reach out today to get started.
