I am close to get a huge achievement in my new role, after 4 months that I joined this company (4 months including Christmas): we will deploy a new fraud system made by me and a team of 2. This project has been open for something like 2 years, without nobody doing basically anything, and now here it is.

I think it is quite important to remind here that GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS are not just coming from big efforts, but also from the correct way of working.
Correct way of working means:

  1. the right hierarchy: if everyone in a team is at the same level, nobody can take adequate decisions
  2. avoid micromanagement, over controlling, spying, blame culture: if there is an emperor, there are also a lot of minions not really interested in quality and ideas
  3. being quick to react: agile is not a buzz word, but sometimes people simply do not understand some key concepts, no matter how many facilitators they have around. In particular:
    • Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
    • The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
    • Working software (and not story point compared among different teams) is the primary measure of progress.
    • Continuous attention to technical excellence (and not closing each ticket with shamefull patches) and good design (a design should exist, and it should not be ambiguous) enhances agility
    • At regular intervals, the team reflects (IN PRIVATE) on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. If the team knows that the thoughts are not private, there is no honesty, and the team does not to become more effective
  4. The culture of a company is key: a bad culture fosters bad results because people who care of the work get stressed and quit, while people who don’t care focus on making the culture even worse

I think I needed to write this post because I experienced those things in my previous employment and I keep speaking with people in that sector, meaning in similar companies, and they have exactly the same issues. Some of them, more than expected, experienced catastrophic burn outs, with years of sufferings.

And in most of the cases, the issue is the manager, because some managers have always dreamt of exercising power, and since they became manager they feel that they can do whatever they want, instead of trying to get the best from people and from their work.

Stay tuned!

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