What!? When’s the decision made?

Making a decision in a team is not easy, especially working in a peer group. MSE studio teams are peer groups. Although there is a team lead in the team, it doesn’t mean he or she is superior to other team members. So, while working in this kind of environment, one big question is “Who gets to make the decision?”

A Story

I remember the first conflict in the Square Root team was happened in the first semester. One day, after the class which was talking about choosing a process for a project, our team was excitingly discussing about what process we are going to use in our cubicle. Everyone was saying his opinion about what processes we should use for each semester. I remember I stood there and kept questioning “Why? Why we should use this process instead of that? Do you have any analysis to show that this process will work for our project?” However, we spent a lot of time on the discussion and we didn’t make any concrete decision. 

Sometimes it was just so difficult to let everyone in the team knows:

When to send out meeting agendas?

When to input tasks time on the sharepoint?

What data we are going to track for the estimation?

How we do planning?

Who should take the responsibility of communicating with the client?

This kind of team consensus problems happened only in a team of five. Not to mention what will happen in a larger team.

Finally, we learned to use “Proposal” to help the team communicate more effectively and to drive the team making defensible decision. 

What’s inside a proposal?

First, we wrote about the objective of making a decision. This sound trivial, but sometimes people really would forget “why they are doing this.” 

Second, the approach of the process we are going to follow. Any detail procedure of how we do things would be recorded here. 

The last but not the least – we also wrote down what metrics and data we wanted to get from this process. This is for future analysis on this process.

How does “proposal” change us?

After we used the proposal approach to make decision, the team started to create a lot more proposals than we thought! For example, we have meeting proposal, process proposal, planning proposal, tracking proposal, and even a proposal for proposals!! 

We became very clear that according to different roles who is responsible for making what decision. We spent less time on quarrelling about any decision we need to make. However, team member would review a proposal and provide very specific suggestions.

Later on, we even invent a proposal survey mechanism to use quantitative data to prove how well the proposals are.

Writing a proposal is never a fun thing, but this is one of the approaches that keep the team align and hold the team together!