{"id":12574,"date":"2013-07-17T16:46:51","date_gmt":"2013-07-17T23:46:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/?p=12574"},"modified":"2013-07-15T00:51:38","modified_gmt":"2013-07-15T07:51:38","slug":"onboarding-critical-success-factor-and-mostly-overlooked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/?p=12574","title":{"rendered":"Onboarding: Critical Success Factor (and mostly overlooked!)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/svapm.org\/?attachment_id=12578\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-12578\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-12578\" alt=\"Onboarding graphic, by Pablo Verdugo, from flickr, some rights reserved\" src=\"https:\/\/svapm.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/onboarding-by-Pablo-Verdugo-flickr.jpg\" width=\"240\" height=\"168\" \/><\/a>It wasn&#8217;t a surprise to me to find, for two years in a row, that our <a title=\"2013 Study of Product Team Performance\" href=\"http:\/\/actuationconsultingllc.com\/whitepaper_request_2013.php\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Study of Product Team Performance<\/em><\/a> identified that onboarding new team members highly correlates to high product team performance.<\/p>\n<p>Last year&#8217;s study revealed <a title=\"Five factors that make teams successful\" href=\"http:\/\/ronlichty.blogspot.com\/2013\/01\/what-makes-product-teams-great.html\" target=\"_blank\"><i>five factors<\/i><\/a> that, when all are missing, is almost a guarantee of low product team performance, but when all are delivered give teams a two-out-of-three likelihood of <i>high level<\/i> team performance. Onboarding members into product teams was one of those five factors.<\/p>\n<p>In this year&#8217;s study, we looked at how teams are doing at onboarding. Here&#8217;s what this year&#8217;s study found:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>75% of responding organizations underestimate the importance of establishing streamlined processes that enable product team members to quickly become contributing members to the product team&#8217;s success!<\/li>\n<li>Only 4% of organizations onboard product team members well enough to claim best practice<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Most organizations apply a sink-or-swim approach to bringing new members onto their teams.<\/p>\n<p>Based on our own experience, Mickey and I considered onboarding so important that, as we developed the outline for our book, <a title=\"Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams\" href=\"http:\/\/www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Managing the Unmanageable<\/em><\/a>, we realized we needed not only to devote a chapter to recruiting and hiring, but one to onboarding, or as we put it in the chapter title, &#8220;Getting New Programmers Started Off Right.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Good team onboarding practices were a lesson I learned early in my programming management career. I inherited Apple&#8217;s Finder team just after they&#8217;d done a ground-up re-write &#8211; and just after most members of the team had departed for some equally ambitious project elsewhere rather than sticking around to enhance and evolve the result. I had a tiny nucleus of a team that I needed to rebuild. And with my first hire, I discovered I had a problem.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s common to give new programmers a first task to set up their programming environments and sandboxes, install their tools, pull source code, compile, and check their result against the team&#8217;s official last build to confirm everything. But when I gave that assignment to my first new hire, our systems turned out to be so convoluted that it took him a week to get everything in place and get the entire Finder built and validated. So the second task I gave him was to measurably shorten that for my next hire. I gave that same second task to every subsequent hire. Three years (and a number of hires) later, downloading the source and tools and creating and validating the build could be accomplished by a green new hire in less than 30 minutes.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s just one tiny part of making onboarding effective and useful. We cover lots, in our chapter on the topic. Most readers tell us that it&#8217;s one of the most valuable chapters in the book &#8211; in part, because it&#8217;s so seldom addressed &#8211; or even considered.<\/p>\n<p>While H.R. departments in many companies establish processes that successfully onboard new employees to the organization, that&#8217;s simply not enough. It&#8217;s important to get them through the benefits part, and to make sure they get a corporate meet-and-greet. But if they aren&#8217;t brought onto their team effectively, their team will suffer for a long while after.<\/p>\n<p>Managers and teams need to establish a broad set of processes that successfully onboard not only new hires but new contractors and transferring employees onto their teams. As the <a title=\"2012 Study of Product Team Performance revealed 5 product team performance factors\" href=\"http:\/\/ronlichty.blogspot.com\/2013\/01\/what-makes-product-teams-great.html\" target=\"_blank\">2012 Study of Product Team Performance<\/a> showed, it&#8217;s one of five factors that make the difference between team failure and team success.<\/p>\n<p>As our 2013 Study of Product Team Performance showed, teams have a lot of room to improve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It wasn&#8217;t a surprise to me to find, for two years in a row, that our Study of Product Team 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