Living Happily Ever After with The Teams and 21 Product Backlog
By: Gibran Raksadinno
Tags: Teamwork, Team Dynamics, Team Building

At first sight, the things that pop in my mind when I heard this subject, software engineering projects, are intensively coding with Javascript, confusion in managing Postgree database, exhaustion because pushing, committing, merging in Gitlab, and many other theoretical things that frighten us. Apart from that I see pleasure, besides UI/UX designing, this is called team dynamics. Actually, I really have no idea when I heard this term, since this is my first-time hearing that. If you are tired with those ‘coding’ things, lets refresh our soul and learn together about team dynamics.

What is team dynamics?

According to teamtechnology,

Team dynamics are the unconscious, psychological forces that influence the direction of a team’s behaviour and performance. They are like undercurrents in the sea, which can carry boats in a different direction to the one they intend to sail.

Team dynamic will be created naturally according to the team’s work, personalities within the team, the working relationships with other people, and the environment where the team works. Same like personality, team dynamic can be either good or bad. For instance it will lead to good behaviour when the team members intend to improve overall team performance and get the best result out of individual team members. For the bad behaviour it might be caused by unproductive conflict, demotivation, and lack of responsibility or sense of belongings.

Team capacity building

Before knowing further about team capacity building, we should know about what team capacity building is. According to Wikipedia,

Capacity building (or capacity development) is the process by which individuals and organizations obtain, improve, and retain the skills, knowledge, tools, equipment, and other resources needed to do their jobs competently. It allows individuals and organizations to perform at a greater capacity (larger scale, larger audience, larger impact, etc). “Capacity building” and “Capacity development” are often used interchangeably.

So based on that statement, we can divide our team capacity building based on 3 main components that can affect team’s capacity.

1. Skill

In this software engineering project, as a student obviously we have to implement our skill that we have learnt in the previous semester. For instance, we already learn how to use Gitlab properly in the web development subject. We have to push our code to Gitlab because the teaching assistant will mark our work based on the code that stored in Gitlab.

My Gitlab Project for Web Development Subject

Not only implementing the skill that we have learnt, but also in this project we are developing a new skill that consist of soft skill and hard skill. The soft skill that we have built in order to boost our team performance is communication skill between the development team and also the scrum master and product owner, sense of belonging that can increase our responsibility to finish the backlog, and rising our self-confidence that is useful for presenting our idea, issue or our final product in front of product owner, scrum master, lecturer, and stakeholder. For the hard skill the new thing that we learnt are developing web application with ReactJS for the frontend and NodeJS for the backend, maximizing the uses of Gitlab with Gitlab board and issue, and UI/UX designing with Figma.

2. Knowledge

The knowledge that I got in this project is mostly comes from the guest lecture that has been provided by the software engineering project lecturer team. You might think the lecture is delivered by old, lame, dull, and uninteractive lecturer but it actually doesn’t. The lecturer is an experienced youth that comes from big company like Jenius, Gojek, and Sirclo. They also present their experience, issue, enjoyment that they have faced form the real world industry. In my honest opinion, the most unforgeable yet the most interesting guest lecture is the one that delivered by Mr. Wiguno, Head of Engineering at Sirclo. He is very insightful and answer our question regarding the technology industry remarkably informative.

Our First Guest Lecture From Mr. Wiguno from Sirclo

3. Tools

The most important tools that changed our product drastically is the Amazon Webservice for our deployment. Previously we use Herokuapp for the deployment but as the database increase, the server is getting sluggish. So based on the previous development team experience they suggest us to use Amazon Webservice or we usually called AWS. The AWS is better because it is still fast and reliable even though the database increase by the time. But we have to pay around 15K Rupiah for the registration fee.

Servant leaderhip

The last but not least is servant leader. Same like team dynamics, I haven’t heard this kind of term previously. After googling, Wikipedia-ing, I found that,

Servant leadership is a leadership philosophy in which the main goal of the leader is to serve. This is different from traditional leadership where the leader’s main focus is the thriving of their company or organizations. A Servant Leader shares power, puts the needs of the employees first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible. Servant leadership inverts the norm, which puts the customer service associates as a main priority. Instead of the people working to serve the leader, the leader exists to serve the people

According to Wikipedia, we can conclude that servant leader is one of leadership manner with the approach of “servant”. In this context, servant is not like literal servant but is more like how the leader lead by serving, shares power, puts the needs of employees first, and helps people to develop themselves. It puts the customer services associates as a main priority as well. Servant leader does different approach with traditional leaderships philosophy. Instead of the people working to serve the leader, the leader exists to serve the people. That is why it called servant leader.

As the team that applies servant leadership approach, we do share our power. Every member has an ability to rebuke other team members. Not only rebuking, but also we have to accept if we don’t performed well other people could also rebuke us. Besides sharing power, we do service the customers as the main priority as well. Although they gave us 21 product backlogs, we are happy to serve them with doing the project happily ever after. (actually we are dying inside).