`People Management` by Roman Paska

04.06.2016 @ DrupalCamp Kyiv’16


by Roman Paska Head of Web Development @ Lemberg

People management



Intro



About me● Head of Web Development @

Lemberg Solutions

● 7+ years with Drupal

● facebook.com/roman.paska

● twitter.com/T2LPR

● drupal.org/u/taran2l

Responsibilities● Technology leadership

● Sales support

● Processes improvement

● Client relationships

● Human resources

● Team building



What this presentation is about?

It’s not about project management

It's not about the development process

It’s not about tools and software

It’s (almost) not a Drupal-specific session

It’s all about people



Recruitment



Because you will be working with them!

Why should I care?



What do we do?

1.Pre-screening and screening

2.Technical and HR interview(s)

3.Test task

4.Cultural interview



Pre-screening and screening

First line of defence

Done by recruiter

Ensure that these steps are present

This step is not your responsibility



Technical and HR interview(s)• Create a questionnaire template (Google Docs/Spreadsheet)

• List of questions must reflect your and/or your company’s needs. Do not google for them. Create them

• Questions should be of different complexity levels

• Avoid more than a few logical tricky questions

• Share it with the team

• Educate every team member so anyone can do technical interviews

• Make notes during the interview

• Do not ask all the questions. Respect your interviewee’s time. Skip too easy questions, do not torture with too complex as well



Test tasks• Create test task(s)

• Better to have more than one

• Avoid any ambiguity in description

• Tasks must be relatively simple. Think maximum 8 hours of work. Respect time of the candidates

• Create spreadsheet for the results. Set weight for each task (e.g. 1-3). Set grades range (e.g. 0-5). Set pass rate (e.g. 75%)

• Share all that with the team, educate everyone how to use it

• Make sure that more than 1 team member checks the work



Cultural interview• This step is even more important than all the previous ones

• Allows filtering out candidates who do not fit your company

• Last line of defence. Do not skip it

• Invite candidate to your office

• Invite couple team members, e.g. 5 or 6. Ideally should be of various job roles: developers, QA engineers, PM etc

• Talk about everything, but do not ask any questions you might want to have in technical interview template. Asking about preferred OS is totally OK. However, how to create a block is completely not.

• Discuss with the team. Make sure to listen to all the opinions. Decide whether to do an offer or not during this discussion



1:1 meetings



What is it and why should I do it?

• Short regular private meetings with each team member

• Help to discover hidden issues

• Fix conflicts before they are starting to hurt your company

• Relatively easy way of organizing personal development

• Make your colleagues a little bit happier

• Help to build a stable and friendly teams



What the format?• Meetings should be short (less than 15 minutes)

• Talk regularly (ideally each 2 weeks)

• Talk privately (nobody should ever know what you are talking about)

• No forbidden topics

• Check action items from the last meeting (if any)

• Proceed with a quick summary. Be open. Be honest

• Hear your teammate out. Be attentive. Be careful

• Make notes of topics discussed (Google Docs works)

• Add action items (for you and/or for your team member)

• Repeat



Automate everything



Reduce amount of monkey job• Create and polish internal processes

• Make them simple

• Automate as much as you can

• Reduce amount of boring administrative tasks

• Concentrate on interesting challenging tasks

• Find the most boring, complex, time consuming thing and simplify it

• Repeat



Drupal ecosystem



Make your Drupalers even better

Educate your team about Drupal ecosystem

Take part in local, regional and global events

Organize events



Educate your team about Drupal ecosystem• Taking part in Drupal project is as important as doing commercial work

• Learn how Drupal ecosystem works

• Ensure that everyone has an account at drupal.org

• Give back:

• Create an issue if you found that something is wrong

• Add a comment if you can reproduce the issue

• Post a patch (or reroll) if you fixed something

• Add/edit a documentation page to share your investigations

• Publish your translations

• Any contribution counts

• Encourage others to act the same



Take part in local, regional and global events• Events are not free of charge, but they're not that expensive

• Go to your local events. Meet people. Talk. Teach and learn

• Make presentations. Share your experience

• Ask and answer questions

• Go to regional and global events. Meet people. Talk. Teach and learn

• Meet different cultures. Listen. Talk. Learn

• Regional and global events are very inspirational

• Promote Ukraine

• Encourage your colleagues to do the same



Organize events• Organizing an event helps to develop soft skills

• Soft skills are as much important as technical ones

• Build a local community around Drupal

• Strong community attracts more developers (mostly, good developers)

• Strong community means broader visibility

• Strong community gives better projects



Q&A



Thank you!

Leadership & Management

`People Management` by Roman Paska