Handbook of Team Design: A Practitioner's Guide to Team Systems Development

Rating:
Summary: A comprehensive and practical guide
Review: A tremendous discussion and reference of the nuts and bolts for all kinds of teaming in the IT world. It's loaded with nuances related to teaming that you won't easily find in one place. It's also a good review, thinker, and is exceptionally well researched and written. I definitely reccomend this book to anyone who is serious about adding to their skills in this often overlooked but necessary specialty.

Rating:
Summary: A really unique and original work for teaming know-how.
Review: A tremendous discussion and reference of the nuts and bolts for all kinds of teaming in the IT world. It's loaded with nuances related to teaming that you won't easily find in one place. It's also a good review, thinker, and is exceptionally well researched and written. I definitely reccomend this book to anyone who is serious about adding to their skills in this often overlooked but necessary specialty.

Rating:
Summary: A comprehensive and practical guide
Review: This book is a comprehensive analysis of the points throughout development life cycles where team collaboration is appropriate for creating deliverables. Formats and methods for conducting team workshops are set out in great detail, based on the organizational environment, project type, end result desired, and particular phase of the life cycle.

Jones proposes a "framework" for development which he calls Team Design and which he contrasts with Joint Application Development (JAD) and other group methods. Jones defines five Formats (Business Process Design, Requirements Definition, Application Design, Team Planning, Decision Making) under which almost any development project or part thereof can be placed. He devotes separate chapters to each Format, defining for each Format the life-cycle steps within the Format, the workshop agenda activities that apply to each phase of the life-cycle, and recommended workshop methods (e.g., brainstorming, scoping diagrams, scenario analysis) that can develop the deliverables for the phase.

Team Design comprises a generic set of life-cycle Phases (Initiating, Scoping, Visualizing, Usage, Packaging, Validating) that can be mapped to each of the five Formats. For each Phase, Jones then recommends certain workshop methods that can be used regardless of the Format. This allows flexibility in analyzing all the factors facing a Project Manager and Facilitator (organization type, project type, end result, life-cycle phase) and adapting a workshop plan that will apply best. It also allows for bridging of experience with workshop methods across different Formats.

Jones also deals in depth with a wide variety of topics related to team-based development, including: (1) JAD and Participatory Design: A survey of the history of these two group-based methods, and an assessment of their strengths and weaknesses in various environments; (2) Facilitation: The scope of Facilitation; the technical competencies required of a Facilitator in a development environment; in-depth description of facilitation tools (e.g., conflict resolution, problem solving) and workshop methods (e.g., brainstorming, diagramming, Pareto charts), and their applicability; (3) Requirements: Analysis of the major problems faced by organizations in creating and managing requirements, and how Team Design can address those problems; (4) Team Dynamics: The phases of team development; team-building techniques; special issues involving workgroups comprising members with different functional backgrounds; and (5) Organizational Culture: The impact of organizational dynamics on a company's receptiveness to structured methods and team-based approaches to development.