Building Trust as a Software Development Project Manager

If you are a software development project manager, you know that communication and trust in the project team are as important for the success as the technical challenges. This excerpt from a blog of Keavy McMinn gives an interesting insight on how to build trust.

I’ve been fortunate in my recent roles, having built up enough track record, that the organization leadership has trusted me, allowed me the time and space to do this type of work. With that trust comes a high expectation and responsibility to deliver, so to sustain it you need to do what you say you will and do it well.

One thing I’ve learned that helps nurture that trust is being transparent about your work. I talk and write about what I’m working on, what challenges or threats there are, what my next steps are. I like this work to be discoverable, as well as just accessible, and my preferred medium for this is markdown files in a company repository. I want important discussions around tradeoffs and direction, and certainly decisions, to have a URL.

At GitHub, I enjoyed a culture of writing proposals down and having that work be discoverable by anyone in the company. Because my team and I valued our autonomy to build so much, but had an awareness of our vulnerability, we often went above and beyond with this. We would share written proposals, design documents, learnings from spikes, records of decisions, roadmaps, estimates, how we arrived at those estimates, everything. The downsides included sometimes getting unsolicited ‘drive-by’ criticism, which can be unpleasant. The upsides included strengthening our own approach through having to articulate it and often adapt it.

Building that trust enabled me and my teammates to do even more: to have more autonomy, to take on more responsibility and to build more challenging work. People had seen our process work. When we said we’d do a thing, they knew not just that we would deliver but that others could see it happen and learn along with us. This is how we can have nice things.

Source: Building Bridges as a Technical Leader, Keavy McMinn, https://keavy.com/work/building-bridges/

How do you improve morale and build trust in a project team. If you do have a software development team with incredibly poor morale and high burnout, it is likely that you might be going to lose some of them. That is not a failure from you. You should remember that you can improve the overall health of your project team while losing some members.

To improve trust in your project, you need your team to have a win”. Pick the smallest possible win you can find. Depending on the team health it might just be something that you achieve with a single developer who has a slightly more positive attitude. It might be better if it is a win that the whole team can contribute to, but either way you need a win and then you need to build on it. People want to be part of positive achievements. They create their own momentum that you need to use to your advantage.

Here are some additional resources about building trusts in software development project teams.

Building Trust and Transparency in Software Development. From day one, at the core was building trust through transparency, feedback, quality delivery, and proactivity in all our collaborations and teams. It showed us that a partnership approach built on trust and transparency not only leads to product and project success but also opens doors to other projects and opportunities, as many of our clients come through referrals. Trust is hard to acquire but easy to lose, so these six elements should be at the heart of every project and team.

Building trust in a software team is a waste of time. Here’s what you should do instead Everyone talks about the importance of building trust in teams. Companies spend significant time and budgets for various workshops, training, trips, and exercises. It’s important to understand that trust doesn’t result from the number of team exercises you conduct but rather from the team culture you create. And creating a trust culture is more important and easier than you might think. All you need to do is to give trust to your teammates right from day one as if you worked with them for years, and instead of trust-building, you should focus on trust maintenance. We usually assume that trust should be slowly built over time and the transition from regime and micromanagement to growing freedom is slow. I suggest you reverse the order.

How Project Managers Can Build Trust and Improve Project Performance This article describes what trust is through the eight laws of trust, explains what makes a person trusted through my six-component trust model, shows you a seven-step process to build trust, and gives you a tool that will help you build trust in your project team such that you will gain some project improvements.