Starting with Carol Donnelly, our SharePoint Senior Manager, Entrance gained 5 new SharePoint Consultants in 2012! We’ve also developed some techniques for managing this growing team that we think will help maintain a high standard of work over time:
Recruiting: Finding great people
With many companies either moving to SharePoint 2010 or investing in Business Intelligence, Entrance’s SharePoint team needed to grow both rapidly and intelligently in response. But in such a specialized industry segment, it’s hard to find good people quickly. Entrance also strives to hire employees that are a good fit for the company culture. What we have found to work best is to hire intelligent, driven people that are a good company fit, and then work to train and grow them to fit their new job.
To this end, even though our work level could have supported more developers, we have forgone some of this growth in order to ensure that the quality of each team member is there.
Pair Programming: Ensuring both growth and quality
Because of the range of expertise across our SharePoint team, we pair more experienced team members with quick learners to complete the same task together. Because the pair switches off between coding and testing for each project, neither gets bored doing the same thing over and over. And the benefits of this system are twofold. First, the more experienced team member can give very quick feedback so their teammate can learn as they go along. Second, paired programming also functions as a method of unit testing, which results in saved time and less errors overall for the client.
Managing career development
For all of our developers, whether they are just starting out or years into their career, we emphasize the value of continuing education. This helps them to get further in their career, in addition to staying current on what is important in the technology world. From being the first to use Windows 365 and SharePoint 2013 to conferences to Scrum Master training, career development is a key goal for Entrance employees.
In addition to training, we encourage our developers to be clear about their long term career goals. Based on each person’s individual desires, we also train them for future promotion as team or project managers, for example, so that they don’t stagnate in the same position. And their growth is a benefit to us, because they go on to be future leaders of less experienced developers.
Watch this video to find out more about Entrance’s processes!