Multiple projects, one team

[Harag]

Hi

If you have one employee and you assign 2 projects to them, they soon get stressed because they working on two project at the same time.

However, if you have 1 team of 5 programmers and you give them 5 projects to program that requires 1 programmer per project - e.g. contracts,

Would they all get stressed because they are working on 5 projects at once (even though they can do one each), or would they be ok?

[HQRDà]

I often assign 2 projects to teams but i think they will not get to much pressure if you don't overcharge them for too long.
Also my support teams are all assigned on the same 3 tasks and do not get stress at all.

I do have teams working on a particular project like 2Deditor, so i often have one designer or artist not working at some time but they create so good software i don't even care or know their salary or if i could use them in some other task.

In what case do you have to assign a team to 5 projects ?
And do your strategy is making a big PROG team, DESIGN team etc to developp multiple softwares with? This would be a bad strategy in the long term imo.

[Harag]

I've currently got a small firm, and my team of developers / artists have finished a large project, while they were developing, my designer team created 2 new projects to develope, but require fewer people per project. so I was hoping to give the 2 projects to the team to do at the same time. This lead me on to wondering what would happen if I had more dev/arts in the team and gave them 3 project to work on.

Yes I could split the teams down into 3, but when the version 2 of my large project is designed, I would want the whole team on that again.

[HQRDà]

Then i think you should developp them one by one, depending on how is the market and
future releases of competitors. This way you at least have one thing bringing money why you developp another and even can even create new teams to developp the next thing your designers are onto. Otherwise it will cost you a lot making twice the time not bringing money you could use in creating new teams.

I don't think their is any consequence making a software develoment longer while unassign. Until you haven't choose a release date yet and their is no new feature discoverd that could lack in this one. Design it twice is not that long if you need to anyway, since you ll make enough money by choosing wich one to release first.

Also having different prog teams is a way of balancing the different code you inject in a project. You won't have too much system code in something that needed more 2D code for exemple. You can find yourself in the situation where you can't improve quality of the software anymore since those thing havent been balanced enough before reaching estimated code units.
I Do have a 2Dteam that work on all 2D editors, and sometime i use this team to improve 2D code in another project for exemple.

[Mr. Bitches]

Having a good leader and a meeting room assigned to each team goes a long ways towards reducing stress. With that, you can assign upwards of 10 tasks to a single team before the most stress-prone employees start to complain.

[Harag]

Originally posted by HQRDà:

Also having different prog teams is a way of balancing the different code you inject in a project. You won't have too much system code in something that needed more 2D code for exemple. You can find yourself in the situation where you can't improve quality of the software anymore since those thing havent been balanced enough before reaching estimated code units.
I Do have a 2Dteam that work on all 2D editors, and sometime i use this team to improve 2D code in another project for exemple.

I'm currently playing around with the "X-Perience" mod which give me 8 special skills, using the new "Team Minimum Specialization" slider, I'm hoping my team will work on the different projects correctly.

e.g. I have 1 person in 2D 70%, the rest are rubbish in 2d, another in Algorithm 70% rest are rubbish etc. then use the slider on the teams screen to set the minimum value to 60%, so in thory the only person working on the 2d code, is some with over 60% skill in 2d.

However when you look at the project info it still says 5/1 developers as it counts all 5 in the team, not just the one that is "skilled" to work on it via the min setting.

[HQRDà]

I do that too. That's a quite handy way to tune the developpment of multiple projects at the same time. Anyway if they are counted in project info, your employees won't add any code if they are not skilled to, I may not have properly understand what you last pointing meant to say though.

[Harag]

Correct, the last point is basically if you have 5 developers and the project only requires one, then it says 5/1 on the project info sheet (i icon) so it "looks" like 5 people are working on it.

I really hope CoreDump fixes this in the future, maybe telling me which developer is actually working on it too would be neat.

[HQRDà]

Originally posted by Harag:

I really hope CoreDump fixes this in the future, maybe telling me which developer is actually working on it too would be neat.

Good point.

[LatN's Strategy]

Seperate teams by talents, art, design, ect... Build a training team set to 1month rest, 4months training and -1 for training employees get an HR trained leader for this team. Swithch tem back to training team when done with project. You can swithch as many as you need back to thier team when you need them again and they will be better trained. You can also set them to other talents when they have mastered thier original talents and train them in new talents.... Works great!

[HQRDà]

Originally posted by LatNWarrior:

Seperate teams by talents, art, design, ect... Build a training team set to 1month rest, 4months training and -1 for training employees get an HR trained leader for this team. Swithch tem back to training team when done with project. You can swithch as many as you need back to thier team when you need them again and they will be better trained. You can also set them to other talents when they have mastered thier original talents and train them in new talents.... Works great!

But how do you keep this strategy in the long term? switching all the time employees from a team to another keeping tracks of them when unassigned is very tough management. I leave my dev teams as they are, adding one from "training" team from tim to time but thats all and it work quite well also.