Tuesday, October 12, 2010

From theory to practice- Transitioning isn't as easy as it seems

I've been involved recently with the task of creating different projects. In order to do this, I followed the simplest and most important rule in the book – just put the most dedicated individuals on your team. However, with the induction of each separate member in the team, the allocation of responsibilities became more complex and the communication too started becoming a thorn in the flesh for the project vision that I had in mind. However, through agile approaches, currently I am able to lead and integrate my team effectively.
I didn't had enough time to bask in the glory of my newly-founded team equilibrium when my junior students asked me to mentor for their project too (we're having a common project by IBM, namely TGMC 2010). Okay, I said, and went into their class for a briefing. Upon entering the class, I was surrounded by a group of around 70 students, all willing to enter (and most of them already have) in a contest requiring people to submit Ajax driven websites that leverage SOA as their middleware, but very few having experience in even basic html . To get the people up and running, I created a blog wrote a basic how-to (http://bbdnitm-tgmc.blogspot.com/2010/10/getting-up-to-speed-towards-building.html).However, after 4 days, I am yet to get a comment from these people and have resigned to the fate that they need to work really hard if they ever want to see anything at the end of the tunnel. A few of them might deliver a workable solution after 6 months, but for the rest of them, the pain would be inevitable. From my side, I am willing to mentor any person who is a quick learner of jsp and middleware stuff and although I don't know much about the IBM's product usage, I am willing to learn and help others ease into deployment into IBM specific technologies like DB2 and Websphere/RAD. This incident has led me to think about project management in a new light, and now what I am feeling personally is that it is as important to have an able team as it is to find a mentor. Apart from this, it is the approach that matters for an individual, rather than his/her skills.

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