Team Culture

Information Flow

Organizational culture defines what kind of relationships team members have within and across teams and how they communicate. The organization's communication structure is extremely important for software development. Remember Conway's Law:

Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure - Melvin E. Conway

In other words: Software is shaped by the communication structure and the communication structure is shaped by the organizational culture. Therefore, any organizational culture that unlocks a more efficient communication structure is extremely powerful.

The importance of organizational culture has also been proven through statistical research. The DevOps Research and Assessment program (DORA) has analyzed the development capabilities and habits of 23000 development teams. Their results show that organizational culture directly impacts software delivery performance.

Organizational culture can be seen as the sociological foundation for the systems that development teams build. It affects how team members behave and communicate and what type of information they exchange. In software development an uninhibited Information flow is important to deal with complexity. Systems are often so complex that neither developers nor business stakeholders can fully comprehend all the decisions and tradeoffs that are required. A collectively created perspective needs to be created that incorporates different expertise from different people. This requires information flow within and across teams.

Westrum Culture Model

To analyze and measure organizational culture the DevOps Research and Assessment program (DORA) used the Westrum Culture Model that concludes how different levels of trust and information flow in organizations lead to three very distinct organizational cultures:

• 👿 Pathological Culture
  • Power oriented
  • People are not trusting each other and will see cooperation, criticism or experiments as potential threats.
• 😐 Bureaucratic Culture
  • Rule oriented
  • People trust and follow bureaucratic rules but won't think out of the box.
• 🤗 Generative Culture
  • Performance oriented
  • People have enough trust in the organization to cooperate, to take risks, to experiment and to criticize without blaming.

This applies to groups of various sizes such as teams, departments or whole organizations and can also vary within larger groups. For example, it is possible to find teams with a generative culture within a bureaucratic organization. The Westrum culture model is based on a questionnaire that can be given to team members to calculate a culture metric. The following questions have to be answered on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree):

• On my team, information is actively sought.
• Messengers are not punished when they deliver news of failures or other bad news.
• On my team, responsibilities are shared.
• On my team, cross-functional collaboration is encouraged and rewarded.
• On my team, failure causes inquiry.
• On my team, new ideas are welcomed.

Effective Team Dynamics

Google started a research project called Project "Aristotle" to figure out the traits of effective teams. Their research showed that group norms are much more important than individual traits or skills of team members:

Over two years we conducted 200+ interviews with Googlers (our employees) and looked at more than 250 attributes of 180+ active Google teams. We were pretty confident that we'd find the perfect mix of individual traits and skills necessary for a stellar team -- take one Rhodes Scholar, two extroverts, one engineer who rocks at AngularJS, and a PhD. Voila. Dream team assembled, right? We were dead wrong. Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions. - Google HR

The research identified five important group dynamics:

• 🙏 Psychological Safety

  Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes (Amy Edmondson).

  • Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem.
  • Acknowledge your own fallibility.
  • Model curiosity and ask lots of questions.

• 🙏 Dependability

  On dependable teams, members reliably complete quality work on time.

  • Clarify roles and responsibilities of team members.
  • Develop concrete project plans to provide transparency into every individual's work.

• 🙏 Structure and Clarity

  Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?

  • Regularly communicate team goals and ensure team members understand the plan for achieving them.
  • Ensure your team meetings have a clear agenda and designated leader.

• 🙏 Meaning of Work

  Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?

  • Give team members positive feedback on something outstanding they are doing and offer to help them with something they struggle with.
  • Publicly express your gratitude for someone who helped you out.

• 🙏 Impact of Work

  Do we fundamentally believe that the work we are doing matters?

  • Co-create a clear vision that reinforces how each team member's work directly contributes to the team's and broader organization's goals.
  • Reflect on the work you're doing and how it impacts users or clients and the organization.
  • Adopt a user-centered evaluation method and focus on the user.