Teams Provide Platform for Individual Innovation

From my experiences at Tektronix and Hewlett-Packard as a team member and team lead, I find that bouncing ideas around in a team lead to some spectacular individual results.Too often, something said in jest triggers some very creative ideas. Good engineers produce good work, good engineers in teams, produce excellent work.

We often used brainstorming meetings at the beginning of projects.As long as we did not make fun of any comment, the best ideas would slowly rise to the top. Brainstorming is a great tool to start off any project. We then started to identify and prioritize tasks that needed to be completed for this project to go well. Often this was accomplished through an Agile Methology tool. There are an array of tools available, from CDC Cards through the Scrum Methodogy.

Sometimes each task goes smoothly and there is not much channge to the initial plan. As roadblocks and other occurences happen, achieving the next goal can become very difficult. Good communication is a slight plus to any project. Data collection during the process is a vital part of each projects success. Reviewing that data leads to more efficient processes for the current and future projects.

A good example of a project with a team goal and the opportunity to allow individual to shine was the Apollo missions to the moon. The goal was to safely get atronaunts to the moon and then back safely. One of the early divisions of this project was to independently produce the Saturn memory modules and the lunar lander software. These worked spectacularly well.

Teams provide opportunities for members to help each other succeed in ways that were not envisioned at the start of a project. Good engineers produce good work, good engineers in teams, produce excellent work.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.