The Team Standard is a set of overall principles that shall guide any engineering team to create a prosperous productive engineering culture. A culture that prefers people over processes, and considers any end-result or success as a side-effect to a successful engineering community.
Products, projects and deliverables come and go. Your best product today shall become legacy tomorrow. And what really lasts is the relationships you've developed with your team during the process of building such products.
An engineering team with strong culture can become an unstoppable force, powered by passion and compassion. Aiming to fulfill it's goals on both the individual and community levels.
This Standard is written by an imperfect man. Therefore it shall also be imperfect. Incomplete. Subject to be changed or modified and completely scrapped off. It's an accumlation of personal experiences in the engineering industry, and proposed solutions to protect future generations from toxic and counter-productive practices.
This Standard is also forever changing. It's a reflection of ongoing learnings, experiences and interactions with many engineers within several communities on daily basis. It's always open for input, no matter where you are, what you are or how long you've been the industry. This Standard is built to make sure your voice is heard, recognized and appreciated.
The main intent of this Standard is not to create obedient cogs. The type of cogs you may see today following orders without questioning. Heartless, cold and brainless cogs, willing to let go of their principles (if they had any) to appease their masters. This Standard would rather inspire the re-birth of prosperous, ambitious and innovative humans - embodying every single aspect of their humanity into what they create.
The principles of The Team Standard are aiming towards protecting any engineering team from organizational diseases and toxic patterns such as silos, saviors, favoritisms, levelisms and many other patterns that plays destructive roles into slowing down if not blocking the progress of any team on both the individual and community levels.
The Team Standard mainly outlines three main factors that directly impacts the engineers in any team on daily basis in terms of productivity. These factors are: The Individual, The Community and The Purpose.
Let me briefly explain why these factors are critical to any engineering culture existing or just starting from scratch.
Engineers are the building blocks of any team. They are the foundation of any culture. Without engineers there's no community. Without a community there's no culture, purpose or product. If engineers are not taken care of, the entire community falls.
But Individual engineers without strong relationship between them are no different than a bunch of random individuals who happen to be in the same elevator at the same time. Nothing in common between them except for the envirmental situation. Therefore, a community has to be established, to outlined the communications, interactions and relationships between the individuals within that community.
A community without a purpose is like a ship with no compass. You may have the strongest, smartest most ambitious individuals with the greatest relationships with one another. But without a real purpose you have a ship with no compass. Being lost shall burn through the strong ties of any team till there's nothing left but empty shells.
An engineering team that makes their culture a higher priority than their deliverables are destined to succeed into whatever they do. This Standard favors people over numbers. People over profits. People over processes. It doesn't just aim to help you deliver a good product, but rather empowers you to look beyond the material and embrace a more fulfilling life pushing towards the suvival of our humankind, it's evolution and fulfillment.
Sincerely,
Hassan Habib