Another open door I suppose, or, at least I hope it is. When it comes to developing software it mainly is a team effort. This means that when the team feels good, the team will be more productive. I’ve encountered a lot of situations where the project team was steered top-down, where project management was concerned with results and used pressure to get those. In my opinion, this is not the way. People like to work in a friendly environment, where stimulation and fun are keywords.
Complimenting teammates is always good. Even though the project seems to stand still, you’ll still need to make sure the people within the development team are aware that they are valued. Positive stimulation is always a better motivator than negative rejection.
When a team uses fun and positive stimulation, work gets more and more effective and more and more work simply gets done. Any project where the team itself steers and shows the way is far more likely to end in good results. This is because people tend to identify themselves more with something they feel positive about.
When we develop software we create something from scratch, not just some lines of computer code. We create a piece of art, something we thought about and something we even might care about. That’s why we need to reflect the things done by the development team in a positive way. And it works. I’ve seen cases where significantly more functionality was delivered by the development team when the approach was ‘fun’.
Fun is one of the factors often underestimated within any project. Do you have any examples where this worked? Or the opposite didn’t?
