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In the summary of Chapter 10, mention was made of how important a good team is to a successful system implementation. This aspect is so important that I have devoted this chapter to a discussion of my experience regarding what makes a strong team and how to go about finding the right kind of people to make up such a team.

The term "team" is used loosely here. Many people contribute to the building of these systems, from hardware engineers to end users. All of these people are vital to the construction of a world-class system. My own experience has been mostly in the teamwork required for the technical portions of the system-hardware through to application development.

First, let's dispel a myth. Good management does not necessarily make a good project. The opposite, however, is true: bad management will make a bad project. It doesn't matter how good a manager is if the people managed are not capable of thinking for themselves and acting on their own initiative. The best managers do not spend their days micro-managing their people-they spend it protecting their people and guiding them through the higher-level processes.

In short, the best managers often appear to be members of the team, whose responsibilities within the team are to administrate events that are external to the team and to suggest direction. Clearly this is not always possible, and managers rely on the quality of the team as much as they rely on themselves. However, it is clear that poor managers are those who are

The traditional view of a team is the immediate team-the people with whom you work directly and who you are involved in recruiting. This section describes my personal opinions on building a successful immediate team.

Often, this type of person is difficult to find. In fact, with the explosion of the information technology market, the average individual on the market is of a generally low quality. The reasons for this are numerous but can be fairly well attributed to short periods of service at each of a succession of employers.

The net result of this low quality, combined with massive demand, is that you typically get to choose from a selection of overpaid, underskilled individuals. This can lead to an enormous amount of frustration and wasted time when trying to find the right people for a new team, because huge numbers of interviews are necessary to get the right people on board. For this reason, it is often worth taking a different tack: Don't look for skills, look for attributes.

By making attributes your first priority, it is likely that there will be a skills deficit in the successful candidate. Don't worry about this, because a person of the right caliber will soon be running with things that the so-called skilled person would never be able to handle.

The motivation of the individual is critical to the success of the individual, the team, and the manager. The impact of poor motivation spreads far beyond the individual, potentially afflicting the whole team. Poor motivation on the part of any individual increases the workload of all the other team members for a number of reasons. First, the manager must spend an unacceptable amount of time trying to inject some motivation into the individual, leaving less time to perform tasks that benefit the entire team. Second, a lack of motivation is infectious. At the very least it will lead to resentment from the more motivated members and potentially can eat into their own motivation.

Self-motivated individuals allow a team to run almost on auto-pilot. If they also have the right skills, the motivated will never be idle; the manager will not need to be involved in allocating the trivial tasks. Taken one step further, the highly motivated individual will latch onto larger projects that need work, even though they are not immediately obvious to others. This kind of preventive medicine for the system will lead automatically to a more stable system.

Many problems persist because there is no way to solve them using standard techniques. These problems can be solved only by "thinking out of the box"-flanking the problem from some other direction. If an individual is not able to think this way, much of the problem solving will be left to other individuals on the team. This can cause problems when trying to run an on-call rota, because the nonlateral thinker will nearly always end up calling another individual to solve the problem.

Lateral thinking, however, is something that can be taught to some degree. Much of the method of lateral thinking is having an expanded repertoire of approaches that can be used in place of the norm. Some investment in mentoring with a true lateral thinker can improve the nonlateralist a great deal.

Responsibility for both one's own actions and the system in one's care are essential attributes. Nobody wants an individual on their team who will walk out on a problem at five o'clock. Likewise, being available to help one's peers in times of trouble is good for team spirit. However, being responsible does not mean being staid-it's also important to have some fun while being responsible.

Building and operating a large system is complicated. Therefore, even very experienced individuals must maintain a steep learning curve if they are to continue being useful; the day will never come that you can stop learning. In the case of the lesser experienced individual, the learning curve is essential. There is a magic period of about 3 months where an individual should at least be able to get around all the systems in the network and understand the whole configuration to the point of asking intelligent questions.

Perhaps one of the most difficult attributes to acquire, communication is a tricky skill. This skill is especially important when dealing with people who are exterior to the project-support personnel, for example. Communicating all the pertinent information in a concise way is very important when there is so much information to pass on. Compounding this is the fact that with so much activity going on, it is easy to forget some of the required communication. Luckily, e-mail saves the day in many cases, because it provides the perfect method for short, FYI exchanges.

First, what is hard work? I would assert that hard work does not necessarily equate to spending a lot of hours in the office, but rather to how efficiently those hours are spent. Often, of course, hard workers will spend many hours in the office and apply themselves efficiently during that time.

Closely linked to motivation, hard work is the thing that turns ideas into reality. When the hard work is all mental and not physical, it becomes even more important to keep the level of effort high. I'm sure a neurologist would laugh, but I believe the human brain to have a memory hierarchy similar to that of a computer system. If the activity level is diluted, the cache warmth will be poor, and the throughput will be an order of magnitude slower. This is evident when one is trying to write a complex program with constant interruption. An individual who is not scared of hard work will produce far greater results than one who is.

When building and operating the system, all of these people could be required to perform some tasks at your request, and vice versa. Therefore, they form a virtual team around your immediate team.

Often there is no choice as to who is assigned from external companies. However, if you are not happy with the attitude or skillset of an assigned individual, it is important to say so and find somebody else. One rule of thumb to use when assessing the skillsets of external people is to see if you know more than they do about their areas of expertise. It is not a good sign if you know more, although sometimes it is necessary just to get "all hands on deck," regardless of whether they deliver 10 percent or 100 percent of their advertised abilities.

When good individuals are found, it is important to treat them as members of the team. Many times, external companies will try to reassign people for no apparent reason, and this must be resisted at all costs. Finding good people at external companies is even harder than recruiting them for the immediate team.

Forming and retaining a strong team is vital to the construction of a world-class system. If you cannot recruit skilled people with the right attributes, consider waiving some of the skillset requirements. Sometimes this means doing some recruiting at colleges and just taking the smartest people, regardless of their industry experience. It is important, however, that the corporate salary structure be able to expand their compensation at the same rate at which their market value grows. If this cannot be accommodated, poor retention will be the result, a frequent downfall of university recruitment efforts.