Building and maintaining complex enterprise grade software obviously requires a lot of teamwork.
At the periphery of engineering teams are people like product managers, customer support engineers, customers themselves, sales & marketing, finance etc.
We take great efforts to ensure that these teams function with as less friction as possible. Offsites, lunches, dinners and other team activities Play a vital role.
Not to mention the tremendous amount of effort put into appraisals, One on one and skip level meetings. Other forms of encouragement to keep each member of the team motivated to deliver his or her best.
It will now be a little over nine years that I have been hands on in media production.
Not surprisingly, media production is also a Huge team effort. Especially on the day of the shoot a lot of these stakeholders come together to create The magic that we eventually see on screen.
Anyone who has spent some time in media production will agree that the day of the shoot is one of the most critical time of the entire process. You have to make every minute count.
What is surprising however is the fact that most of these stakeholders like the camera crew, the art department, costumes, Direction team, Sound, production support, lights, artists, Catering et cetera are all working together for the first time in their lives.
There are no team building exercises or offsites or status meetings Our motivational speeches or other forms of incentives or encouragement.
Yet project after project I have seen this very loosely knit group of individuals work like well oiled machinery.
One observation that I have in the latter example is that most of these individuals are highly passionate about what they do.
In the former scenario is it possible that we are trying to find substitution for passion with external motivators?
