Using AI for customer service in your company is a definite method to save time and money. If you’re like most business owners, you’re constantly searching for fresh, creative ways to improve your enterprise. We’re here to inform you that improving AI customer service is a simple and rapid win.
If you have a team of software engineers and want to move them to Mac, you will need to consider a number of things before you do so.
How do you make a successful distributed Agile software development team? Darn, I thought maybe this time we’d have a simple multiple-choice question. Okay, fine, tough questions – tough answers. The answer starts with a C, the letter that keeps everything going – from coffee, cash, and computers to communication, cooperation, and collaboration, it also works for CPU and things like Command & Control, Conquer…
A successful agile software development team consistently delivers on time, and within budget, high-quality software that works as intended.
Give or take, WAI might be replaced by meeting or exceeding customer expectations, delighting users, and/or fulfilling its business objectives.
What’s noticeably absent are any metrics, but that doesn’t mean metrics aren’t useful. Success comes incrementally, by degrees, not all at once unless you’re playing Powerball. In the Age of DevOps, even successful teams can find ways to improve.
Obviously, the number of skills useful to a team is mind-boggling in number, say nothing of other variables like where people are working and how large their team is. But we can define three primary factors that make successful Agile teams – agreeableness, skills, and team structure.
It’s vital to know the technical skill proficiency and experience of your team member. If you’ve worked with your team for any length of time, you probably already have a good idea of what each member of your team knows – at least relative to the projects you’ve done so far. Automated analytics plays a part in being able to optimize teams on a per-project basis, as well.
Sometimes projects take you into new territory with technologies you haven’t worked with before. Check with your team and verify if they have experience in it, and if not, you’ll need to work with your IT agency. There are significant shortages for a number of skills, and they usually take longer or prove more expensive to fill.
But, with success and funding, that team is likely to expand its development efforts. Instead of having 10+ developers reporting to a single software engineering manager, it’s more efficient to assign a team leader for every 3 – 6 developers. The team leader is then responsible for participating in the project meetings and sharing all relevant information with their team.
Fundamentally – software developers must eventually transition from developing their team to developing teams of teams.
With a team distributed across multiple time zones, it’s important to set up a communications structure to guarantee everyone keeps informed and can get answers promptly. This applies to meetings, standups, retrospectives, code reviews and spur-of-the-moment, but time-sensitive questions. Your daily startup might kick off the day for your developers in California while those in Europe are getting ready to wrap up their day. There’s also the question of whether you’re letting your developers work flex hours/days outside of meetings. So, just like computer systems use protocols like TCP/IP or X.25 to connect with each other, in a distributed environment, so do we.
Thu 01:38:50
Thu 04:38:50
Thu 09:38:50
| TYPE | DESCRIPTION | USEFUL TOOLS |
|---|---|---|
| Formal and Fixed | Any scheduled meeting – and 99% of meetings should be scheduled, preferably 24 hrs in advance. | Video conferencing like Zoom or VR meetings with software like Spatial. |
| Routine | Communicating the status of tasks to other stakeholders. | Chat and instant messaging tools like Slack, with over 12 million daily active users, and detailed notes in Jira or other PMS software. |
| Informal and Urgent | Someone needs an answer, ASAP! | Chat and instant messaging tools like Slack. If you need 360’ visibility on your team, Sococo can put everyone into a virtual office. |
| Casual | Chitchat, ideas for future consideration, etc. | |
| Ad Hoc | SHTF scenarios requiring a formal response to something urgent. Ideally few and far between. | Notify with Slack or call via Mobile to meet on Zoom. |
If you’re not working in the same office and same overlapping hours, there is no guarantee you can communicate with someone immediately. Even then, they might be in the powder room and a full-on DefCon 1 scenario will have to wait. But going to the other extreme also bites. Contacting teammates late Saturday night with an important question starts with once, turns to twice, and pretty soon it’s a habit.
Every team starts somewhere. With continuous effort, any team can achieve greatness. There’s a process for this as Renata Pataki, [CEO for Gitential / Gitential’s Head of Product ] also suggests in her article, Improving Agile Team Performance. Five of the seventeen reasons identified by PMI can be reasonably associated with team performance, directly or indirectly. These include team member procrastination, task or resource dependencies, limited resources, and the notorious, other reasons. This harkens back to Stripe’s Developer Coefficient citing a 31.6% developer inefficiency rate.
The core of any continuous improvement effort is being able to identify where improvements can be made and to prioritize improvements according to their impact. Renata points out that provided you maintain the same quality standards, an improvement in one performance metric will inherently improve multiple metrics. You can carry this over to your retrospectives to let your team decide which metric to focus upon, how to improve it, and how to measure the improvement. Over a year, your team will be able to work on at least two dozen performance metrics. The results should be readily apparent.
Using AI for customer service in your company is a definite method to save time and money. If you’re like most business owners, you’re constantly searching for fresh, creative ways to improve your enterprise. We’re here to inform you that improving AI customer service is a simple and rapid win.
If you have a team of software engineers and want to move them to Mac, you will need to consider a number of things before you do so.
Here’s what’s new in our January 2023 Release Notes:
* Tables Columns Sorting Improved
* Reconcile Commits Count Between KPI Card and the Table
* Efficiency Tab Improvements and Efficiency KPI Cards Align
