The Evolveum team is great. I cannot put it in any other way. It is the best team that I have ever worked with. I have a long history of projects that I worked on: big projects, small projects, corporate projects, academic projects, consulting projects, deployment projects, development projects … and some of these were extremely exciting and they had really good people on board. But none of the project teams was anything like the Evolveum team. Not even close.
What makes our team this great? I suppose it is a combination of several factors. First of all we have the best people. Each team member has a slightly different personality. Each of us has their own little quirks. But all the team members support the common goal. We work together, not against each other. And it is perhaps this precious combination of human characters and the atmosphere of cooperation that makes our team mostly self-organized. The team does not have any strong central coordination. Oh yes, I’m formally “The Architect”. But I do not give orders. I do not distribute the work in the team. Nobody does. Team members are doing the work because they want to. Also the amount of coordination that I do is close to zero. It mostly amounts to answering questions and discussing ideas. Everybody somehow naturally knows what to do.
If anyone told me five years ago that this self-organization is a real thing, I would not believe that. But it is real. And it is unbelievably efficient. MidPoint project formally started later than its competitors. But our development pace is significantly faster. MidPoint is now the biggest and the most comprehensive open source identity management system. We have left our competitors behind. Thanks to our excellent team.
Our team does not work together in one office. We are distributed in space and sometimes it looks like we are also distributed in time. We are used to cooperate remotely. Therefore it is quite a rare occasion when the team meets in the flesh. Like this one:
We met for a chat and a glass (well, glasses, actually) of local wine. There are several excellent winemakers on the slopes of Carpathia montains. And we have comandeered a cellar that belongs to one of them …
Unfortunatelly, not all the team members were able to come there. But most of them did. And I had something to say. I had to say how thankful I am to be part of all of this. And I would like to repeat that. I thank every member of our team. Every single one: I thank you to be with us. There were hard times and you stayed with us. You did your best. So thank you all. And thank you to your families and friends that support you. You are the best team that I was ever part of. And that means something.
you just have admitted someone organizes the work but you don’t know who is that. well, you evidently already fly too high. welcome to upper middle management or consultancy class perhaps? 😉
Yes, as written in the article, everybody organizes one’s own work. Everybody knows what to do and this knowledge is based actually on the motivation of people: they like their work and see the purpose of it. They want to be useful to each other and achieve a common goal.
Therefore, it is the intrinsic motivation we use, motivation of sense and this kind of motivation does not need any help “from above”. This way, people are able to work the most effective way if they have enough freedom and space at work. Of course it is possible only with specific types of personalities and smaller teams. Probably not in a companies with 1000+ employees.
If you are interested in knowing more about motivation, just let us know, I can recommend you some books. I can also recommend you some books about teamwork, because teamwork is actually based on not having a leader. Everybody’s even to each other.
Thank you for recommending us the upper middle management, but it is needed in places where an order is missing.
If you have any other questions or would like to discuss anything else, please feel free to do so. I will gladly answer everything.
Best regards,
Veronika Látková
marketing department