Working in a small team
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Hi everyone! In this post I’d like to say something more about working in a 4 men squad, fairly small-sized Scrum group. Our set up is: 2 people in graphic department, one programmer and me as a producer. According to Scrum framework, a team should be cross-functional, which means knowledge of all the aspects of development and design is available to the team. In reality, each of us has little to no prior experience with our minors, so in order to deliver what is expected of us and to fulfil our goals we need to closely cooperate. Collaboration is a key factor here and I’d say that we contribute in more broad way than some of the groups because of that. What I mean by that is we do not limit ourselves just to our minors and instead of simply dividing the work between individuals we try to do things together as much as possible, support each other, think of solutions together and generally try to understand what others are doing. As an example, I’m not only the producer, but also a member of development team. While my main job is organising the work and maintaining a good workflow, I’m also a programmer who codes secondary scripts, such as scrolling background or lighting getting darker over time. Besides that, if a coding problem occurs, both me and the lead coder seek for a solution as it is easier to find a mistake together. My group’s artists took joint approach too and while drawing they are in the same room most of the time so that they can share experience and ideas at once. Moreover, we prefer to gather on a meeting rather than to work remotely. That way we can always reprioritize tasks if one of us needs a piece of art or more insight about a feature. Psychological aspect also plays its’ role during these meeting as each of us is more motivated seeing everyone working and putting active effort into accomplishing our goal. I personally think a small team is also an advantage – from the group dynamics perspective, it is easier to operate with fewer people. Discussing ideas and features comes with ease, there is not too many clashes and we are able to find a consensus every time we think of something differently. To sum up, I think a small group can be just as effective with comparable effort as long as we are flexible and clearly communicating!  |