Who Should Work with Whom

1
Who Should Work with Whom?

• Building Effective Software Project Teams

2
Psychology for Computer People
3
Why do projects fail?

• Human aspects of software development are more
  important than the technological aspects
• Factors
• Composition of members
• Team leadership
• Intrateam communication and coordination

4
Composition of the team

• Previous studies have shown that successful teams
  have diverse personalities
• Study done by authors
• Effect of project leaders personality on team
  performance
• Effect of team members personalities on team
  performance
• Effect of heterogeneity of personalities

5
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

• Social Interaction
• Information Gathering
• Decision Making
• Dealing with the External World

6
Myers-Briggs

• Social Interaction
• Introvert Work alone
• Extrovert People Oriented, sociable
• Information Gathering
• Sensing Seeks detailed information, facts
• Intuitive make impressions without details,
  imaginative, futuristic

7
Myers-Briggs

• Decision-making
• Thinking based on logic, objective
  consideration
• Feeling based on subjectivity, personal
  consideration
• Dealing with the External World
• Judging Organized, establish deadlines, expect
  people to follow through
• Perceiving flexible, view deadlines as
  guidelines

8
The Test

• Surveyed 92 IS professionals from 20 software
  development teams in Hong Kong
• Aside from personality test, those surveyed were
  questioned on
• Amount of work by the team
• Quality of work
• Efficiency of team operations
• Effectiveness of user interaction
• Frequency of schedule adherence
• Frequency of budget adherence

9
The Results

• Team leader personality
• Teams with an Intuitive team leader outperformed
  those with a Sensing
• Whole-picture oriented, innovative ability to
  assess alternate solutions
• Able to come up with the big idea
• Feeling type better decision makers over Thinking
• More people oriented, make decisions based on
  individuals
• A more open-minded team leader who takes people
  into consideration is more motivational and
  encouraging than the always rational type and
  group members will be more willing to share ideas
  if the team leader is willing to accept
  constructive ideas

10
The Results

• Systems Analyst
• Thinking type over Feeling type for decision
  making
• Obviously
• Analytic skills of systems analyst more important
  than behavioral skills
• Need to multitask in a completely analytical
  fashion for best results of the team

11
The Results

• Programmers
• Surprise! Extroverts are more effective in small
  teams than Introverts
• Programmers must interact with several parties
• Designers
• Other programmers
• Other operators/test dummies
• Extroverted programmer more suited for a wide
  variety of tasks
• Beware the person in the dark room alone!! They
  might knock out more code than others but that
  code might not interact with the rest of the
  project

12
Heterogeneity between team leader and members

• The team leader and members should differ in
  personalities
• Its ok to have a team of introverts and analysts
  if you have an extroverted and intuitive team
  leader
• Differences between members did not show a
  significant difference in production

13
Thoughts for management

• Personality has different effects on small teams
  than large teams
• Project leader and members should be diverse in
  the social interaction and information-gathering
  categories
• Disregard different personalities among team
  members (I disagree)

14
More Thoughts

• A team leader should be intuitive and should feel
  out decisions made
• While a team leader should be perceiving and
  flexible with deadlines, the members should be
  judging and very schedule-oriented
• Make sure the systems analyst is thinking-type
  decision-maker