The Role of the Team Lead in Managing the IT Team

Flexible team management is one way to speed up development and bring an IT product to market. Let's consider why an IT project needs a team lead, how he/she can improve the work on the project, and what you need to become a successful team lead.

We'll talk about the approaches that helped us at SimbirSoft to implement more than 900 solutions for businesses and train more than 80 team leads within the company.

There are several management roles that may speed up the implementation of large-scale IT projects. Among them is the team lead, an experienced developer who manages the IT team and bears responsibility for the technical management of the project.

What tasks does the team lead help to solve in the IT project?

Owners of IT products are often asked whether ‌team lead participation in the project is mandatory. According to our observations, self-organization is sometimes possible in start-ups or small projects at the initial stages of development. And if you need to reduce time-to-market or avoid risks, then you normally cannot do without a team lead. But foremost, it is needed in large-scale projects and distributed IT teams.

Examples of the team lead's tasks in the project:

• create a team and microclimate within it;

• ensure compliance with deadlines and other requirements within the project;

• implement and maintain communications within the team, between teams and with customer representatives.

The team lead also monitors the workload of the IT team during peak loads, for example, in relation to the emergence of new tasks, withdrawal or replacement of experts, allocation of sub teams and appointment of employees in charge. In addition, the team lead decides on the redistribution of tasks or the expansion of the team.

Case study. The team of one of our long-term projects consisted of backend and frontend developers, an analyst, a QA, a designer, a team lead and a product manager. In preparation for the release, requirements suddenly changed and deadlines shifted. As a result, together with the customer, we decided to temporarily expand the team so as not to overload employees with overtime work. As the most urgent tasks were completed, we gradually released new specialists and switched them to other projects. This approach made it possible to speed up ‌app development and ensure an adequate load on the employees involved in the project.

If external experts participate in the development of the project, along with the customer's team, one of the team lead's tasks is to arrange processes in such a way as to preserve expertise and key artifacts on the customer's side:

• source code with comments,

• ToR and documentation,

• directories and APIs,

• business process notations,

• architecture,

• prototypes and design layouts,

• deployment guides and tools,

• test cases, autotests, testing documentation,

• guides, workflow, and regulations.

If there is a project implementation history, up-to-date documentation, a knowledge base and source code, the product owner becomes a full-fledged owner of the intellectual deliverables. In addition, it will allow them to manage the product throughout its life cycle, make changes and involve new teams in ‌development as necessary in the future. It also allows the team to refer to the project requirements or documentation at any time.

What a team lead should be able to do

In addition to the above management functions, the team lead as an experienced developer has ‌good technical expertise and bears responsibility for the entire technical part of the project. The team lead takes part in selecting the appropriate technology stack and preparing technical documentation and, therefore, must have the following hard skills:

• architecture development, coding, code review;

• optimization of the development process;

• control of the project's compliance with technical requirements.

What skills and abilities a project team lead needs to develop to achieve success

To successfully achieve project goals together with the IT team, the team lead needs to develop the following soft skills:

• Communicability. Arranging oral and written communication is a necessary and important skill for the team lead.

• Responsibility. The team lead should demonstrate maximum responsibility for the result in order to create the required atmosphere and culture within the team, where each employee is responsible for their part of the work and tasks.

• Delegating. The team lead should be able to correctly distribute tasks among team members depending on their professionalism and experience, taking into account their preferences and aspirations.

• Motivation. The team lead is the liaison between the IT team members. The motivation of other participants depends on the team lead's motivation and ability to charge with positive energy and inspire for the result.

• Effectiveness. To achieve results within the project scope, a good team lead, firstly, clearly understands the goals, knows where their team is going, and can explain the goals for each participant. Secondly, the team lead should be able to quickly find the root cause of the problem, take the initiative and quickly make a suitable decision.

• Growth. Team leads must support the professional growth of the team and match the colleagues' skills by constantly developing technical expertise and other skills.

Conclusion

The team lead, like any manager, needs to be able to feel the mood of the IT team and timely identify disruptions in the processes.

The following measures help improve the effectiveness of the team management process:

• Flexible approach to team building, the possibility of reinforcement and rotation.

• Implementation of relevant management practices, development processes, and roles.

• Improvement of the microclimate and team synergy.

Our employees can master these approaches at the Team Lead Academy and with the help of other corporate training programs. For your self-study, you can read the books that we specifically selected for you.

Useful books on project and team management:

1. Scrum: A Revolutionary Approach to Building Teams, Beating Deadlines, and Boosting Productivity by Jeff Sutherland.

The book describes how the approach works and highlights its advantages.

2. Improving Agile Retrospectives: Helping Teams Become More Efficient by Marc Loeffler.

The book contains proven practices and approaches for retrospectives, as well as detailed examples that help to understand project mistakes and easily find a way out of the situation.

3. Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg.

The book contains recommendations that will help the team to successfully use Scrum. It will be useful for both beginners and those who are already familiar with this methodology.

4. Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.

The author explains how to learn to listen to the interlocutor and accept their point of view, and also shares practices that will help control your emotions at work.