Bob is a manager in an IT product company. His team is responsible for the support and maintenance of a product. His team has started on the agile transformation journey six weeks back and is slowly getting used to the new practices. One of their customers asked for some customizations; the first set of which was delivered yesterday. Today morning this customer called to report a major problem with the delivery. Immediately Bob and his team looked into the issue and found a workaround which they have promised to deliver in the next one hour. While Bob is waiting for the delivery of the workaround, his mind is thinking about how he could avoid such a situation in the future. He knows that the developers in his team will blame testers for not finding the bug in their testing. He has heard testers complaining in the past that developers deliver everything towards the end of iteration and unavailability of sufficient time for testing. While he could point out that the customer also did not find this issue in their pre-production testing, he wants to ensure that his team owns their failure, find the root cause that caused it and take measures to prevent such issues in the future. What will be your advice to Bob; particularly adhering to Agile values and principles?
Suggested Solution :
Bob should communicate that the team is responsible for the failure. Everybody in the team is equally responsible for it and no one should point fingers at others. Rather everyone should think of what he/she could have done to prevent this failure and what he/she could do to avoid such a failure in the future. With that guidance, he should withdraw and let the team work further, by themselves. analyzing the causes and deciding on measures to be taken for prevention of such a situation in the future. He should review that analysis and see where he could help and extend that help. Important thing is, he should refrain from driving the analysis and dictating the solutions. He should let the team do that. When the team finds solutions they will also own their implementation and that is what would make them agile!
4 Responses
Hi Shiv, I can relate to this, it is a real different world.
I was invited a few times to address students appearing for CET exams as an industry person and found it challenging to connect with them. I was able to connect somewhat as one of their concern was what if they do not get into a good college, which I was able to address by sharing real life examples.
Thanks Vasu. College “brand” no doubt helps early on in work life – corporate doors open more easily. But down the line, it is people’s motivation and track record that helps build careers. I am sure we have all seen examples affirming this. I have stressed with the mentees that I work with. An aside, the mentorship program I am involved in spans 4-5 months and so, I have had time to work on the “connect”! Yes – takes time and effort.
Hi Shiv – very well written – thanks for the write-up.
Many years ago I was a volunteer mentor for a couple of youth as part of Dream A Dream’s life skills mentoring program. This was in person mentoring where the mentee and I would meet periodically (usually on a weekend) and discuss general topics. There was no prescribed structure though all mentors did go thru a few hours of in person training. Based on that experience I can corroborate that it takes time for the mentee to open up, especially in that case given their lack of confidence in expressing in English which was the recommended language for communication. Switching to Tamil (in one case where the mentee was from Tamil Nadu) helped.
Can also relate well to your point on swings in mood and engagement level of the mentee and the need for mentor to shift gears accordingly.
I am sure the mentees are benefiting a lot from your vast and varied experience – hope you will come back to mentor more such students after you complete the current mentorships and possibly take a break!
Thank you, Bhasker!