A-team and B-team, Offense and Defense, Dev and Ops - resetting the mindset of IT.

A couple of weeks back I saw a Tweet from Harvard Business Review in regards to so call "B-team"-personas. I can honestly say that I have thought of some people like that a couple of years ago. Today - I find that kind of thinking horrifying.

Still I do find that kind of mentality within IT, where some do consider colleagues working with operations, maintenance, help-desk or similar roles to be the "B-team". People working with implementation, design and development is considered the "A-team".

This is something we need to change - first and foremost to get away from the "us and them" way of thinking. There are other reasons as well:

1. We are all different. We are all driven by different aspects in our job. I prefer to break new ground, work with architecture and interact a lot with others. Others find pleasure in troubleshooting, digging deep into code. They find pride in keeping things "stable" to ensure that people like me can develop it without getting stopped by an "unstable" environment. What I'm saying is - without the one, neither will be able to do what they are good at.
2. We all have different goals in life. This is probably what I struggle with the most. I always want to learn new things, to improve, to change things for the better. Its been my way to know if I am successful and that I have achieve something - if I have improved. Since this is something I love, it comes very natural to me. Others don’t really care - they are very proud of the job they are doing, but they don’t have the interest in being anything other than what they are - from a career point of view. And that is fine and that again ensures that the people that enjoy being in one place can be there and be very, very knowledgeable in their area. Again, everybody wins.
3. We all have different roles to play and we play well with different persons. Most of us understands that IT-departments today have many different players in their team: FTEs, consultants, interns, operations, architects, managers and employees. What we sometimes miss is that we also have very different people, and everyone cant get along with everyone - especially not if you view the entire organization. I know that I can be a PITA to some people from time to time, just because of HOW I am. Not who, not what, not due to which "team" I belong to. But I do believe that the persons many see as the A-team (I may be an A-teamer to some and others would not see me like one, for sure) may share a few similarities in terms of personality - which doesn't always work well with other people.

So - instead of trying to group humans into teams with different status. Try to group people after their skills, passions, personalities and don’t rank them. Instead, think of it like American football where you have an offensive line-up and a defensive line-up (sorry for all of you NFL fans out there, I'm not as into it as I would like to be). They are equally important, even essential for the success to the team. Its not the "A-team" and the "B-team".

When needed, each line-up is called in an "applied" to do what they do best. That is exactly the way we need to think about people in IT as well. That, to me, is what organizational Dev and Ops should be about (from an infrastructural point of view). Let the Dev team do what they do best - drive change and let the Ops team do what they do best enable change to happen.

In coming post I will dig deeper into this way of thinking - which is something I have become truly passionate about. I would love to hear your thoughts on it, so write a comment or send me a message and lets celebrate our differences - and leave the A- and B-teams behind.