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title: 'Organising a Development Team for Productivity, Capability, Impact, and Knowledge Sharing'

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*How would I organise a team of developers, working on a variety of different systems and processes to ensure productivity, capability, impact and knowledge sharing?*

### Mark Hanley
#### 4th April 2025

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## Key Areas of Focus
To structure our development team effectively, I would focus on four key pillars:

1. **🚀 Productivity**
Enabling high performance with clarity, balance and self-sufficiency
2. **📚 Capability**
Supporting growth, learning and effective, secure delivery
3. **🎯 Impact**
Ensuring work aligns with institutional priorities and delivers value
4. **🤝 Knowledge Sharing**
Promoting collaboration, transparency, and team learning

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## 🚀 Productivity

- **Agile with Adaptability:**
Build on the lightweight Agile methodologies we have used in some larger projects like ADTx (e.g. Kanban/Scrum hybrid) by extending these to other projects. Deliver iteratively, stay adaptable, and respond quickly to changing needs.

- **Skill Mix & Role Clarity:**
Maintain a balance between individual specialisms and shared knowledge across the team. In a small team, it's important that everyone has a working understanding of multiple areas, while still encouraging developers to play to their strengths and grow into recognised experts where possible.

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## 🚀 Productivity

- **Minimising Friction:**
Reduce unnecessary meetings, support asynchronous updates, and ensure clear, shared acceptance criteria with measurable success indicators and realistic but flexible time projections.

- **Self-Sufficiency:**
Ensure the team has everything they need to deliver independently — this includes access to modern development tools, reliable infrastructure, clear documentation, version control processes, and the ability to unblock themselves quickly without relying on external teams where possible.

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## 🚀 Productivity

- **Change Management:**
Support structured change processes to ensure releases are communicated, reviewed, and documented — reducing disruption and supporting service continuity.

- **Recognition & Morale:**
Celebrate achievements and milestones to keep morale high. Encourage show & tells, encourage team members to give kudos to others within team meetings, and continue to hold team social events such as team pizza 🍕

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## 📚 Capability

- **Continuous Learning Culture:**
Encourage skill development through training courses (LinkedIn Learning), blogs, podcasts, relevant YouTube channels, online course materials, and seminars. Encourage team members to set aside time for training. Share great courses in team meetings.

- **Emphasise Technical & Soft Skills:**
Support developers in strengthening both their technical skills and soft skills like communication, collaboration, and stakeholder engagement, especially through UoG provided training.

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## 📚 Capability

- **Mentorship & Career Growth:**
Establish mentorship programmes to connect junior and senior developers. Use clear criteria (e.g. Professional Services Career Framework) for progression into more senior roles.

- **Pair Programming & Code Reviews:**
Promote pair programming and peer code reviews as an approach to foster a culture of learning and shared standards.

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## 📚 Capability

- **Secure Development Practices:**
Foster a security-aware culture in the team by sharing good practices (e.g. OWASP Top Ten), supporting secure defaults, and encouraging developers to consider security implications from the start.

- **Prototyping & Discovery:**
Allow time and space for prototyping, technical discovery, and early design exploration in larger projects.

- **Right Tools for the Job:**
Ensure developers have a modern dev environment with tools suited to their work, including local environments and testing frameworks. Consider secure CI/CD pipelines for some projects (e.g. Azure deployments).

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## 🎯 Impact

- **Priority-Driven Development:**
Work closely with project leads/end users to ensure the team delivers the highest-priority features first, and implements them the right way.

- **Empowered Team Members:**
Create opportunities for team members to showcase their contributions. Continue regular Show & Tells to highlight development outcomes or explore new technologies.

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## 🎯 Impact

- **Stakeholder Engagement:**
Ensure developers understand the goals of stakeholders and the broader impact of their work to reduce ambiguity. Help the team stay focused on questions like: What is the problem we’re solving? Who benefits? What does success look like? Regularly share and explore standards such as WCAG.

- **Real-World Examples:**
At UoG, while working on eResources and the Continuous Improvement Tool, my role involved liaising directly with project managers and end users to understand needs—such as around accessibility—and refining features accordingly.

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## 🤝 Knowledge Sharing

- **Central Knowledge Base:**
Continue to maintain accessible, centralised documentation through tools like SharePoint and Confluence to reduce dependency on individuals and lengthy discovery phases.

- **Documenting as We Go:**
Treat documentation as a living part of development — document as we build.

- **Retrospectives:**
Use retrospectives to reflect on successes and areas for improvement. Use this feedback to shape future planning and team health.

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## 🤝 Knowledge Sharing

- **Anchor Days:**
Use our anchor days for group problem-solving and informal peer learning opportunities.

- **Informal Workshops:**
Run regular internal workshops, show-and-tell sessions, and lightning talks to share best practices and lessons learned.

- **Cross-Team Rotation:**
Where possible, encourage rotation of developers across projects to avoid silos and increase shared understanding of different systems.

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## Conclusion
- **Key Takeaways:**
  - 🚀 Productivity: Clear workflows, strong tooling, skill mix, and morale-boosting recognition.
  - 📚 Capability: Ongoing skill development, mentoring, and space for discovery.
  - 🎯 Impact: Clear alignment with stakeholder goals, prioritised delivery, and visibility of work.
  - 🤝 Knowledge Sharing: Strong documentation culture, internal learning events, and collaborative practice.

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## 🌟 Final Thoughts

- Over the past year, I’ve delivered high-quality solutions, worked autonomously, and built strong relationships with project managers and stakeholders — becoming a key point of contact on projects like the Continuous Improvement Tool.

- I’ve consistently shared good practice with the team, leading four internal Dev Team show-and-tells, and offering guidance on frontend development and accessibility.

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## 🌟 Final Thoughts

- My teaching background shaped how I approach collaboration, requirements gathering, and purposeful delivery — all essential leadership skills.

- I’m not the finished article, but I’ve achieved a lot this year. I’ve grown quickly with support and feedback, and I’m eager to keep building on that momentum.

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## 🌟 Final Thoughts

- I’ve established myself as a trusted and proactive team member. I want to build on that foundation — not just to lead, but to support others in growing too.

- I feel ready to step into a management role and continue growing with the team, contributing to a positive, productive, and people-centred culture.

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## 🌟 Final Thoughts

- I’m especially grateful to Gubby, whose supportive and empowering approach helped me grow into this role from the beginning. His trust and encouragement to take on larger projects and lead where possible made a real difference in my development.

- As I’d be stepping into the role he vacated, I feel fortunate to have such a strong model to follow — one that I hope to build on and carry forward in my own leadership.

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## 💬 Questions