configuration management

Personality matters a great deal when you need to be able to help a small team implement essential software configuration management practices. Small teams have dynamics just like any other team and you need to know what it takes to help your team achieve success. SCRUMs may have a maximum size of nine members, but you will likely find yourself in organizations where successful teams grow and you have to deal with the dynamics implicit in a successful team that now has new requirements for communicating and working together successfully. In this column, we will take a look at some of the essentials required for small teams.

Ben Weatherall addresses what happens when large teams shrink to the extent that they are considered small. There are several situations where this commonly happens—for example, when a team has been raided by other teams, when the majority of the work has been accomplished and a large team is no longer needed, or when the corporate situation is such that downsizing occurs.

This month’s topic is a paradigm shift that requires that we move from focusing narrowly on the CM function to the much broader Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) view. I know people who cannot make this shift. From a personality perspective, these folks have great difficulty seeing the big picture and the more comprehensive lifecycle view required by ALM. There are good reasons for these problems, and in this article we’ll examine the personality challenges inherent in shifting from CM into ALM.

Personality accounts for a lot. You can tell a great deal about how someone is going to handle a situation by understanding their personality. In fact, if you get really good at this game you can sometimes predict what they are going to do. Some people just can’t manage to the see the big picture, and that is often evident in how they approach their work, whether tactical project or a strategic product. If you want to be able to work with different personalities then you need to understand what motivates them to act, or in some cases, fail to act.