Over the years I’ve been part of several teams that had banded together to build various projects. Several short months later the projects were dead and the team was gone. What happened?
One of the more common issues that I have noticed is of people joining the project & then not understanding the technology. Not the internal team technology, but rather the development frameworks and languages used. In most cases, the team members would become frustrated that they couldn’t learn the language or framework at a fast enough pace to keep up with the rest of the development, or they just lacked interest in learning something new.
Another common pitfall is that team members assuming they could develop at their own pace, when they get a craving to crunch on some code they would go ahead and code, otherwise they would contribute nothing. This would leave the team hanging however, as people would let their workload pile up or pass it on to other people when it was asked of them to try and meet a deadline.
Lastly, my biggest pet-peeve and by far the most common, has been people joining a project and then going silent. They never respond to your emails nor do they contribute to the project in any way.
I’m retrospect, there were several things I should have done that would have prevented this from happening. When you advertise for positions within your open source team, it’s important to remember you’re not going to be paying these people, typically speaking. They’re not required to fulfill any part of their role in the team, but there are things you can do during the selection process that will help weed out some of the un-wanted members.
1: Make sure they understand their role and the tools your team is using.
2: give new members a simple task at first to help get them settled in.
3: Ask them how many hours they can contribute, realistically.
4: find out what they’ve done in the past and give them work that resembles their past experiences. Letting them start out in familiar ground will help keep their interests.
5: use a Project Management solution like Fellowstream to help give your team members some direction.
6: hold team conferences via a forum or chat system at least once a week to toss around ideas and keep peoples blood pumping.
Getting a team built using free help is often difficult, but the fact of the matter is that keeping the team together is the truly difficult part. If you can maintain a team on your project, you’ll make a good project manager.
