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.
