The Power of Collaboration is Unmatched
The longer that I work in software development, the bigger and more complex the problems we need to solve. Early in my career, it was common for 1 or 2 developers to be able to consistently deliver features. As time went along the problems got bigger and we started to incorporate Agile Development principles. With this transition, team size grew and more roles were added to each team. Those agile teams of 4-6 members were able to deliver extremely high quality software at a rapid rate but most projects were still limited in scope to something that a single team could handle.
In my latter years at Dupont Pioneer and my first years at John Deere, it quickly became apparent that the problems we needed to solve could not be handled by a single team. While adding project or program manager roles had a huge impact on the organization and delivery of projects, there was still something missing. That missing piece was cross-team collaboration at the individual contributor level. Engineers talking to other engineers to share ideas and come to agreement on a solution or approach.
Over the last year, one of my teams has gone all in on collaboration and the results have been amazing. As a project kicks off, my engineers reach out to the other team or teams with which we are working to setup a weekly sync meeting. This meeting will be scheduled for the duration of the project. To have a little fun and avoid confusion between projects, they give each meeting a unique name pulled from a list of synonyms for "discussion" (hootenanny, confabulation, etc.)
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The weekly meeting provides a touchpoint to discuss progress, but more importantly provides face time to ask questions and work through different scenarios. A byproduct of having a Microsoft Teams meeting is having a shared conversation thread to discuss items that may come up between meetings. Even when the project ends and the recurring meeting goes away, the connections between the engineers remain. Those lasting connections enable tighter communication and faster delivery of future feature requests or resolution of production defects.
Collaboration is almost always a net positive and has lasting benefits. Something that my teams hear me say often is a quote that I took from The Red Green Show (one of my favorites growing up), "... we're all in this together."