IT team course¶

Tags: nelenschuurmans, python

Last week we (Nelen & Schuurmans’ IT department) went to a conference center in Doorn for a two-day team course with our regular trainer Chris Bos. The goal: improving our work as a team.

Best way to start such a course day: cycling! Doorn is some 30km from my home, so I took my bike for a nice early morning trip.

The course itself? A lot of time was allocated to talking with each other. Getting to know each other better. Getting to know each other’s opinions.

Team? Yes, that means a so-called Belbin team roles test (wikipedia explanation). I personally like that test as it already helped me to get to know myself better (I’ve done the test a couple of times over the years). I’ve got an entry in my weblog that explains my own Belbin roles.

We didn’t dive into the test results right away, but took 1.5 hour to do one-on-one talks. One person would guess the other’s roles and explain “why” to him in 10 minutes. Then the other way around. We did four rounds. I gained a lot of useful input that way!

After that we got everyone’s test results. We got some time to go through our own results and the input we got during the one-on-one talks to come up with the two top roles we normally perform. After that we dived into everyone’s results and gave a lot of feedback. Useful!

We did more, of course, like a one-hour explanation by Bastiaan, our “boss”, about his idea for arranging the work in our department. And we got to give each other feedback on small irritations or weirdnesses. And a card-based exercise for figuring out what every one of us thinks is important when working together as a team.

The main effect of the course? We know each other more. And I think the Belbin team roles will help us to split up the workload better. We’ve at least put up the Belbin results on our big central whiteboard :-)