Professionalism Series - 6: Beyond the milestone

Work is stressful around deadlines. Sleep comes at a premium.

In fact, you work so hard for the deadline that any additional days you spent after (missing) the deadline gets that much more frustrating and tiring.

The problem is that often people will put all of that “last-home-stretch” effort for, say, their development deadline ; Or the deadlines for making v.0.1 of some deliverable.

This is a problem because they are inaccurately telling themselves “As soon as I meet this deadline, life will become a cool splat of monsoonal rain in the middle of summer”.

In work, the real work only begins with v.0.1 of something, or after the basic development is complete. Testing will cause a number of changes. After the alpha version we can start analysing, discussing and improving the concepts. We can start getting feedback on our work.

Professionals understand the entire lifecycle of the product, over the next 3-5 years.

• They understand that the “project” isn’t over until the software is launched and maintenance begins, and that the milestone is just one of many that they must achieve in order to complete the project. They also understand their role in each step

 

• They understand that the first launch is just the first version of the product, which will subsequently lead to other launches.  They understand what that means for the type of development and architecture that they must do today.

 

• They understand the importance of contributing professionally to each step in the process as much as they can.

Understanding the entire lifecycle that a project or product goes through is important, and balancing your stress from the anticipation of what is ahead is also important.

Lifecycles exist for software, for individual documents, for specifications, for plans, for strategy, for website designs, for ads, for brochures, even for people (i.e. their probation, work, and long-term growth at work).

It is also best to take this lifecycle as a way of building a sense of community. Just like in college you were able to divide the years according to semesters and breaks, at work you could end up saying “oh in two weeks are are starting code-camp again”

My Ideal Employee Series - 5 : Team Player

I think this tops the list of misunderstood job qualification terms.

This is also another factor that depends both on the company and the individual.

There are many different ideas that make up a ‘good team player’. In essence, being a team player does not necessarily mean that that the team should “decide and work on things together”. To me, it really means how the person allows the team to work faster, and achieve results more quickly. Here are some specific aspects:

Does the person complemenet the entire team with what he brings to it

The ideal team is one where no skills of any person overlaps, with the team chair facilitating between all the specific perspectives. I.e. people in their specific places are all excellent in their own areas and are producing together. In case skills overlap, there is a chance that ideas or perspectives will conflict.

In the real world, skills often do overlap, but great ‘team players’ will not turn the overlaps into conflicts, but rather they will always focus on complementing  the team with the skills that the team lacks.

Does the person waste time in winning small ego-centric battles

Some of the worst professionals I have met spend 80% of their workday challenging, reopening, running rhetorical arguments on, analysing or otherwise standing to conflict with other peoples’ ideas, decisions, work plans etc.

Being a team player does not mean that the team should constantly deliberate on options until one concensus is achieved for each small insignificant decision in the team.

So the right team players give everyone the freedom to decide how to do their own job, and do not stand at odds with anyone else even if they do wrong.

Instead, the team player would work with the other person in helping to fix the issue for the team in a non-intrusive manner.

Does the person know his specific place in the entire operational engine

Great team players know their company very well, and they know precisely why the company needs them, or for what responsibilities the company hired them.

They also understand how companies and teams will only be successful if they themselves work towards that success.

Non-team-players sit in a team and expect orders, and they do exactly what was asked — no more or less. They throw hissy arguments on decisions that can easily be left up to individuals and a good collaboration process.

Does the person try to fit in

Great teams become great friends — they go and make their own special group that gets together, reminisces on old times, wears shirts with each others faces on them, whatever your fancy.

The point is, great teams build their own sub-culture, and shared sense of experiences that they can have a laugh over later on. Great teams are great friends.

Good team players, again, do not look at work as a means of building a small empire of power and control. Instead, they try to learn about each other so that they can form a greater bond of trust between themselves.

I once met this person in a team who used to go around berating others like ‘Oh have you seen <person name>… can you honestly tell me if he can ever do anything worthwhile for this company?’ The funny thing was, quite often the people he pointed to had patents and research publications under their belts — he never tried to find out who he was talking about.

The company’s role.

Ofcourse, a lot of this depends on how much the company itself understands the value of teams.

Sometimes the company itself does not encourage getting to know their employees research interests, or project ideas.

Sometimes ‘fitting in’ to a company’s sub-culture means stooping low enough that you accept day-to-day operations full of randomness and lack of direction (to the point of expoitation) and politics.

Sometimes the company does not have well-understood guidelines for the structure of teams or functional units, and the company operations for teams are too nervous to allow for the formation of bonds.

 

I think ultimately both the employee and the company should work with each other with a genuine desire to create more efficient teams with lower overheads (that come from a deep sense of understanding of one another).

If they do, both will benefit.

My Ideal Employee Series - 4 : Dynamic

Have you ever come across the word ‘dynamic’ and wondered why they let marketing staff write job requirements?

Here is my explanation of ‘dynamic individuals’.

One of the most basic realities of work is change. I dont mean it in the large strategic re-prioritization of operational focus. I mean change in day-to-day plans and assumptions based on the external environment.

Even if you are the most structured of firms, you will often find your forecasted plans will change, often many times in a day. In fact in many operations jobs, changing plans is a basic part of the job requirements.

How dynamic you are defines how well you react to change.

First, do you accept change as such an inherent part of your work-life that you have a systematic approach to structuring all your work so that it can be changed easily? Whenever you are creating a document that describes some plans, do you also create a note for the team that describes which parts of the document will need to be updated in cases certain assumptions change?

Secondly, how much of a part of the entire ‘change’ process are you for that team? How many new ideas do you contribute when things do not work the way the team had originally planned? In fact, do you actually push the team to change based on specific revenue or growth opporuntities for the company?

This last underlined bit is what many people typically mean by ‘a dynamic individual’ — i.e. someone who is willing to find and jump on new opportunities for the company. 

It helps to have dynamic individuals on board because then I can trust them to remain in-step with the rest of the company. I would not have to go back to check often if their work is using the new insights gained over the past two-to-three weeks.