More and more I’m discovering that success on the field, the court, and, yes even in the cubes of Information Technology, are not necessarily about having the best technical folks working on a project, it’s about having the best team of technical folks working on a project.

I am not a Kentucky fan. (For those of you not from the Kentucky area, that’s the University of Kentucky. UK has a small athletics program up the road from here.) By all rights, UK should have walked away with the 2010 NCAA Championship. John Wall was the #1 overall 2010 NBA Draft pick and four others (for a record five total) from the team were drafted into the NBA. Then take Duke, the 2010 NCAA National Champions, two hours into the draft no player had been chosen. What did Duke place two players from this 2010 National Championship team into the NBA? How is that possible that they were the National Champs and UK was watching?

I think it goes back to a lesson I learned on the football field years ago. You put your best 11 players on the field, not your 11 best. It’s an important lesson in sports and my professional career. More and more I’m discovering that success on the field, the court, and, yes even in the cubes of Information Technology, are not necessarily about having the best technical folks working on a project, it’s about having the best team of technical folks working on a project. It’s about having the folks that work best towards a common goal. Without the team concept, without a true team unity where everyone is more interested in the overall success of the unit (even to the detriment to the individual), your chances of true success dimension quickly. The project may work, but a truly successful project that makes each of you proud is well… just not there.

Perhaps this is why you find so much passion and shared vision in startups and small companies. Everyone has the shared goal of making the company survive. As we grow we seem to lose that focus. We focus more on being right, not on the the project succeeding. The concepts of cross-functional teams and matrix organizations are all valuable, but they also lead to a state were folks have multiple masters. Where does the loyalty lie? …with the project, the team, or the cross functional team?

So the question is how do we truly build effective technical teams that share the same vision? Well it’s my take away. One of my personal research items over the next few months will be uncovering better ways to build teams. Teams that are not just technically superior in all regards, but also highly cohesive units that can achieve amazing results on and off the court!

I love the way Brian Chan and the folks at Liferay have exposed things like Service Builder to quickly build JPA-based DAO’s. Then they go a step further and offer an MVCPortlet to jump into developing applications the right way, the Java way. The approach fully leverages the caching and persistence that Liferay itself uses. That’s nice! More you say? Well, they recently hired Greg Amerson (#gamerson) and are just about to release a Liferay IDE for Eclipse. Okay, so kewl features plus Tooling support. That’s even nicer. Did I mention AlloyUI to merge Java tags, Javascript, CSS, and HTML in a web 2.0 experience?

Speed of development meets Enterprise… I love it.

So, now that I’m sold, where do I start? Well, I went to the #LiferayEastCoastSymposium last week. That was step one. Step two is to do something useful for my customer and see if it’s as easy as I think it’s going to be. So here’s my goal:

Write and deploy to a liferay 6.0 instance a small portlet that allows a user to select from a group of tables. The user should be able to pick data for an X axis and a Y axis. Then using the data the user should be able to select from a set of charts to display the data. The idea is that a business user can quickly create a chart to display on a customer page.

My plan is to document what it takes for me to go about this… the joys, the frustrations, and challenges.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” is a poem by William Butler Yeats. It was published in 1899 in his third volume of poetry, The Wind Among the Reeds.