InRhythm

Your partners in accelerated digital transformation

challenges

Letting Go of the Formality

It wasn’t that long ago that suits, ties, knee-length skirts, heels and pantyhose were required wardrobe staples. In fact, many enterprise Fortune 100s upheld a formal dress code as part of their HR Policy Handbooks. Goldman Sachs, the last bastion of formality on Wall Street, finally relaxed its dress code and offered a “flexible style” option. They only did so last year. Their updated policy permitted men to choose garments other than suits. Admittedly, this made things more complicated for women but that’s a topic for another blog.

Since we’re agile practitioners here at InRhythm, it made sense to look at our own approaches to talent and acquisition. Not to mention retention. Practices and policies drive corporate culture. Here, Agile Platinum Principle One: resist formality, must serve as one of the pillars of our talent strategy.

If your company doesn’t offer a culture that’s aligned with the needs and expectations of today’s job seekers, then, as Hiring Manager or Chief People Officer, you’re going to have a really hard time. At best, you’re going to struggle and slog through your days and recruiting campaigns. At worst, you’re not going to have any people to serve as Chief over!

The link between informality and tech

Ask anyone within the technology field, or external to it, to describe or draw a person in tech, be it a software developer or a startup founder. The universal response is a male, typically Caucasian, dressed in sloppy jeans and a hoodie. Where did this level of informality originate?

Many would cite Lou Gerstner’s (former CEO of IBM) decision to roll out “casual dress.” Even the New York Times balked with a headline that read, “Black Jeans Invade Big Blue.” Shortly thereafter, Hewlett Packard (HP) introduced “Blue Sky Days” which permitted employees to wear jeans to work on Fridays. From there, dress code devolved or evolved – it depends on your perspective – into what we see today.

However, the Platinum Principal of resisting formality is not restricted to dress code. It extends into everything that we do. Formality also has implications with unconscious bias, how we greet and interact with people, the forms that we require candidates to complete and so on. Tone and style go hand in hand.

How are we resisting formality?

We are constantly taking steps to increase our awareness and connection with our prospective employees, candidates, contractors, staff and employees. Efforts are made to understand what they need so that we can craft our talent, acquisition and retention strategies around their needs and expectations versus requiring that they conform to ours. Here, we have embraced an agile culture across the company, not just in our product development efforts.

As agile craftsmen, with respect to HR recruiting and retention strategies, we have adopted an approach that is more responsive than it is prescriptive. Our applications are deliberately designed with brevity in mind to expedite the hiring process. We measure how long it takes from the time that an application is submitted to an open job posting until someone is seated in the role. A conscientious effort, with monitoring, is made to ensure that we are constantly moving our candidates through the hiring process as swiftly as they seek to do so.

Another way that may come as a bit of a surprise is the effort we make to create a relaxed culture that allows for flexibility and downtime. We understand the enormous pressure and stress that our employees feel as they do all that they can to deliver on our clients’ needs. It’s okay to push through a couple of scrums or back-to-back sprints but it’s not sustainable. Over the holidays, we relaxed with an in-house office party and gave people some bonus time. This week is Valentine’s Day: celebrate it or not, you don’t need to make it about sending flowers and chocolates to your partner. Use it as a reminder to resist formality, take some time and reach out to whomever it is that you care about, be it a parent or sibling or a friend.

Resist formality! Make strides to emulate the people and culture around you. Forcing people into a process defined by its rigor and inflexibility is the antithesis of what a company should do. Particularly a company who’s purpose is to bring agile methodologies and success to our clients.

Stu Weiser,

Director of Talent Acquisition
Image created by katemangostar – www.freepik.com

Practice What You Preach

As agile practitioners and thought leaders in software engineering, when we work onsite at our clients’ offices, it is important that we deliver our best. After all, as consultants, we are viewed as experts brought in with the expectation that we instrument and equip them with high velocity teams. In this regard, as we heard from our CEO, Gunjan Doshi, in last weeks Learning & Growth Newsletter, we are agile craftsmen. Our challenge is how we can balance learning on-the-fly while integrated onsite with our clients and managing their project expectations.

It is one thing to operate as a living lab when you are shielded inside the walls of your company’s office. With the right culture, mistakes will be expected and valued. When they result in a learning opportunity they ultimately drive a new insight into efficiency and judgement, however, when you are working onsite with a client, it can be an entirely different experience. Mistakes can result in injured productivity or be viewed as an inhibitor to progress and improving velocity.

Clients understand that software development is partly intuitive as much as it is scientific, and even masters of the craft will occasionally misjudge. Agile methodologies instill the mindset that we constantly iterate upon and improve our solution as well as our process. This not only holds true in what we craft, but also from within ourselves.  As agile craftsmen it is our responsibility to analyze our own efforts, understand and mitigate risks, decipher inefficiencies in complexity, and test and implement modern approaches, all on behalf of our clients. 

As each of us continues on our own path of learning, an opportunity to support each other within our living lab presents itself. We are a community traveling in the same direction. Such says the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”. We are bar-raisers and we travel together. In this sense, all of our clients can benefit from any of our thought leaders.

There will be times where we struggle. Perhaps, through a buggy release or during the release of a new product with unanticipated difficulty. We must take feedback with fortitude and cannot be afraid to pivot our strategies, evaluate new implementations, test and ultimately learn.

Learning by doing is often the best form of instruction. Agile craftsmen must recognize that failure is a part of the development process. As Robin Arzon would say, “Failure is the platform to which we build upon”. Often times success only provides validation and feedback is an essential aspect of agile development supporting the continuous loop through which we design, implement, test, and learn.

Earlier this summer, the much anticipated release of Apache Kafka 2.3, a vastly popular component in microservice architecture, enabling streaming and real-time processing of records, was met with its own challenges. One of the persistent bugs was related to the user unsubscribe functionality. This was obviously a critical part of their offering today given the growing requirements related to data privacy and simply an essential aspect of any offering to ensure customer satisfaction. I’m sure everyone will agree, in today’s modern service oriented technology landscape, that the customer is in control and products must incorporate their needs if they wish to remain in business.

It’s simply not easy to project our own living lab culture when onsite with a client. The pressure is already high to meet deadlines and each of our own efforts is codependent on others’ to execute and deliver. Another factor can be pride. Nobody wants to err and be labeled as the bottleneck.

So how will you manage to accomplish this? Observation and communication. Follow what the signs say in the subway stations and airports. “If you see something, say something.” This is actually universal advice and is highly applicable to agile development efforts. By remaining sharply aware of what you’re doing and how that work is impacting those around you, your sprint, project, and team, you will be in a better position to anticipate potential challenges and outcomes. You can then communicate these as you predict them or as they are happening so that you can work collaboratively with your client and your colleagues onsite to address them. Sometimes simply managing expectations can afford you the opportunity to make mistakes, and as we know, making them earlier saves future development efforts.

Failing is a part of the process and not having the visibility and foresight to identify and cross-communicate about potential issues creates risk and impedes high-velocity teams. Agile craftsmen are expected to be nimble minded, to think and learn fast. We are expected to err on occasion and it’s all about how we handle that situational awareness and how we are communicating to others so that we all learn and grow together.