This article is following the one where I highlighted some attention points to take care when changing job, but it specifies the aspect in relation to a team of IT professionals.

Here I would like to focus on the importance of a vision, an idea a final point which will drive us to what we want to reach with the team.

I would like to stress that creating your own vision is a fundamental task which usually takes a lot of time and involves both personal (what gives me the highest satisfaction in my work) and professional (where i want to be) aspects. Additionally this isn't a static process, but it will be normal that your vision will change as your career and personal life will progress.

Our own vision will be the result of a personal work, that we will build during or after the analysis of the situation where we will be working. However this is not enough, our idea of what we will be must be shared with our team and (most difficult) it has not to be against the one of our company. For this reason after a personal work, we must follow with a confrontation phase with our bosses and our team.

A good practice is to discuss first with our executive and then keep one or two brainstorming session with our team, later we will close the sessions with a clear commitment for getting the objectives that were agreed.

In my mind, for a shared vision, we need to consider four components:

• What is my idea of the team in 2/3 years?

Here we need to consider two aspects: management processes and technical processes. Concerning management aspects, i think the best is to follow PMI standars. For the technical part i think every team should pursue the excellence (CMMI 5) adopting new processes and modifying the existing ones in a continuous improvement strategy (to be obtained using as much as possible ispection techniques). However keep in mind that every technique is ok, provide you really believe into it and you are ready to go back in case serious problems arise..

• How I need to structure the team?

I always have an ideal structure (that will be explained in a different article) to which i want to go, starting from the initial structure, and going trough changes and hiring that are aligned with the company policies

• How to manage the team?

How am I going to control the team? How i will be able to understand people needs and to contribute to their development?
This aspect is often left unattended o left to some company policy/practice that usually doesn't work (or it is not used) properly. Here I see different levels: a level related to how we manage the delegation process and a level which allows to control and manage the work of our team:

• We need to be able to verify that what we delegate is done properly, without interfering into the work. In my mind weekly status report is the best way (when properly used)
• We need to be sure about work charges real and declared (many times they do not coincide) so that it will be possible to apply the most appropriate control systems, to verify the reaction to changes in the processes and to create historical statistics.
• We should be able to “read” the team forecasting in advance people needs and react/plan the growth of each person in the team.

I think to tackle all these point the best is to adopt the  MBO ( Management by Objectives) technique which is one of the component of my vision.

• What tool I'm going to use?

This question is also answering the previous one.

If the company is already using specific tools, unless you want to review or there are new ones with evident benefits, it will be better to follow what is already existing (the decision depends upon the dimension of the company, upon its philosophy and on the kind of project we are embarking). My opinion is that, if possible it is better to consider to use open source components.
I personally believe that a collaboration platform is nowadays essential; tools for gathering and managing requirements and design the data base are important, as well, but in this case the discussion could go too much further.
In the bottom line, what i want to say is that we should build a set of tools that then will become our set of tool and that we will use to improve the way we work and we make others work.

In conclusion, my vision is a mix of MBO, PMI, CMMI, and contains a structure where delegation is strongly empowerd, where tools are shared, effective and simple to use. I know these may look too ambitious, but they always drove me clearly to the point. However, as in any article, i'm always open to discussion or suggestion.