Tips for Managing a Tech Team

Running any sort of team can be difficult as everyone is different, and people like to work in strange and unusual ways. Running a tech team is not much different and if you have to take on this task you might want to get some advice. When you run a tech team, you need to make sure that you have the right people involved and that you can trust that they have the right skills to complete the project. In this article, we are going to give you some advice on how you can manage your tech team effectively. Keep reading if you’d like to find out more.

Trust Your Team

It is likely that you hired your current team because you believed that they were qualified for the job. This is why you need to make sure that you let them do their work without your constant interference. You need to trust that they will do the job correctly and ask for help if they really need it. A lot of people who work in the tech industry prefer to work on their own as they can get creative and get their tasks done quicker. As long as you clearly lay out what you want from your team and let them know what their individual deadlines are then you should find that your team runs successfully.

Use Feedback

If you want your tech team to really understand what they need to be doing, you need to show them the data that indicates what the customers want. Customer feedback is very important and to be able to create something that they will like, your team needs to understand what that is. Show your tech team the data, they’ll understand it and they will know that you are not just blindly leading them. Make sure to take on board any sort of customer feedback and you’ll have a successful tech project.

Prioritise Tasks

If you have quite a big team of techies working on a particular project, then you need to make sure that they know what needs to be done and when they need to do it. In the tech industry, a lot of different elements depend on something else being completed first. To achieve this, you could invest in some Kanban software that can teach you how to prioritize tasks. Your team will be able to stay on track of what needs to be done and they can help each other out without having to have long meetings that explain where the team is at every few days.

Value Them

As your team improves over time, you might find that their value to your company is actually very high. Because of the nature of the job, your tech team might not want to move up into managerial positions as this will mean them having to stop what they love doing. Make sure to pay your technical team the right salary for the work that they are actually putting into your company. Reward them when they do something which makes a huge difference to how you run and don’t let them get overlooked. Having a great tech team is something that you should strive for and when you have a team that has been there for so long that they know the company inside out then you should try your best to keep them.

Don’t Pretend You Know About Tech

If you are a qualified technician, then you have every right to explain to your team how you want them to work and what they need to do. However, if you are simply someone who is from another department that monitors the work of the tech team, you need to make sure that you value their opinion. They are the qualified engineers and they know how the system that they use works. Techies are often put off by the fact that people ask them to do things that are not possible, and they get treated badly because they cannot come through. Get the opinion of your tech team and find out what is possible, you might even learn a few things from them in the end. Just don’t pretend that you know everything about tech as this is not going to get you very far.

Final Thoughts

Running a tech team requires a slightly different approach than other sorts of teams. You need to respect the fact that your team is more qualified in this field than you and that they know what they are doing. Make sure to value your team and help them to prioritise tasks in order to get the final project completed on time!