Is it cutting corners or is it overkill?
Collaboration is important for many teams. But it’s really hard if teammates haven’t agreed on what quality looks like.
At my previous company, I introduced a practice that opened the conversation on quality by drawing on team members’ expertise.
(And although my experience comes from engineering, this approach should work for an analytics team or any other team where consistent work quality and collaboration is important.)
Here’s how to get started.
- Pick an aspect of quality that makes sense for you. We chose test writing. You might choose readability, documentation, performance or something else.
- Recruit four to eight teammates who are interested in improving the aspect of quality. Schedule a three hour block.
- Pair your teammates together. Each pair chooses an existing piece of work that one person is very familiar with. Over two spurts of 75 minutes, they improve the aspect of quality. Similar to pair programming, the pair should be curious and favor asking questions over directing. Thinking aloud will be very helpful. There should be ample discussion.
- Each pair shares what they learned with the other pairs in a 10-15 minute break after every pairing spurt. Facilitate discussions. And take notes. Pay special attention to what judgement calls people had to make.
- Send out a summary and put it in a wiki. If there was agreement around certain best practices, consider putting those in a guidelines document and publicizing it. If there was disagreement, consider setting aside time to debate those topics.
- Finally, repeat the practice in a month or two. After applying their learnings, your teammates will have more opinions. You might do the practice again with a different aspect of quality. Continue until people feel like there are sufficient guidelines for easy collaboration.
The practice outlined is not appropriate sometimes. If you have mostly junior teammates and homogeneous work, a top-down approach may be better. Also, if there are fewer than four team members, easy collaboration may not be necessary.
But for medium to large teams, easy collaboration enables them to refocus quickly on high impact projects. There’s more overlap which leads to more learning and less burnout due to always being on.
Having clear quality guidelines means less time wasted on rework. And making guidelines inclusively gives everyone a chance to contribute. Finally, the pairing practice’s focus on quality is an opportunity for skill development, which is important for job satisfaction.
What aspect of quality should your team improve?
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(Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash)