Who is to blame if the client doesn't understand you?

At a recent client visit to our offshore center, a senior executive at the client side had a very far reaching suggestion to make for the business: To develop a common language, to describe the workload in terms of a tangible unit, which can be understood by both the client as well as the service provider

Let us consider a parallel example. Say you need to get your car fixed, and you take it to a garage. The mechanic studies it thoroughly and tells you the following problems:

1.       The engine needs some work

2.       The tyres need to be realigned

3.       The air filters need to be cleaned

4.       Etc

5.       Etc

At the end of a 10 minute long list, you nod your head and politely ask your mechanic, “So you think I can pick it up tomorrow?”. Expect a blank stare from him and at times, an expletive to follow depending on how exasperating you have been. The problem there is a lack of this common language. And of course, the mechanic is assuming that you know enough about cars to know how long each of these tasks would take to be completed.

And so, to cut a long story short, it is all about setting the right expectations…and a common language just makes that easier. Do you have one with your customers? Perhaps it is time to take the lead and work on one.

It would be unintelligent on the part of a mechanic to expect a customer to know what exactly his car needs. At the end of the day, a customer would want one thing – his car must run well, and should not have any problems. It is up to the mechanic to convert this need into the equivalent list of tasks. This is very much similar to how a team of software engineers translates a client’s business requirements into a list of technical requirements.

For this same reason, a customer cannot be blamed for wishing that his car be delivered in perfect condition at the shortest time possible. He just doesn’t know what is involved! It is up to the mechanic to explain to him that it may take more time – within reasonable limits. But the key is to have clarity in the expectations set. A customer doesn’t necessarily expect the mechanic to deliver the car in 5 minutes. But he would expect the mechanic’s expertise to be good enough so he can make a reliable estimate of the time to be taken and thereby set a clear expectation.

Similarly, when a client talks demands a particular deliverable be delivered within, say X number of days, the team can always inform him/her if that is not a realistic schedule. But this must be conveyed at the earliest point of time possible and not at the eleventh hour, so there are no unnecessary expectations. And of course, there might be technical experts on the client side who could blow the whistle if your schedule is too lax – so beware of that.

Fresh Eyes Peer Review

As I walked into office today, I found a not-so-little black book on my desk. Curious, I picked it up and glanced through the pages. Now let me clarify, there was no ‘Confidential’ mark on it and so reading it is not a violation of regulations. Anyway, I found that it was a copy of a case study submitted by an ex-intern with the team I worked for, who was trying to study the role of this function in a typical organization.

It was an interesting read, especially since it spoke in an external perspective about a function I am involved with on a day to day basis. The study was done about an year ago, before I was part of the team, and so it actually gave me some information about the recent history as well as some extinct service lines. I saw entertainment value in the exercise, but I am sure there is more to it than just that.

When you are facing a nagging problem on your project – one of those kinds where you are sure you know the solution, but just can’t place it – it is often useful to have someone else take a look at it. It is a form of external consultation, except that instead of a subject matter expert or some individual specialized in offering consultancy services, you depend on someone in your peer group who would have sufficient knowledge to understand the problem and suggest a solution. This cancels the effects of fatigue caused by repeatedly tackling the same problem.

Let’s call it a ‘Fresh Eyes Peer Review’. The most obvious shortcoming is the risk of confidentiality breach and therefore please be careful while applying it to sensitive projects. This is probably common practice in some teams, but might be useful to those who have missed out.

Assuming there is some problem to be solved, and that problem is a human error, there is a clear logic that applies to why the Fresh Eyes Peer Review is so effective. It plays on psychology, and I must warn you, most writers tend to take psychology as a subject to wax eloquent on, even without a good foundation on the subject – a science misunderstood by laymen, but that is a fact we can pick up on another day. Coming back to the topic, let me take you through why the Fresh Eyes Peer Review is generally so effective. And for that, let us consider the essential elements of such a peer review exercise:

1.    One is given the opportunity to express his opinion on another’s work/idea and possibly find fault with it

2.    One is able to comment on a project he/she has not put in an effort into building, and therefore has no stake in. This enables the reviewer to suggest disruptive changes and daringly innovative, fresh ideas

3.    There are no personal favorite elements in the project for the reviewer; so there is no reason for thoughts on the lines of “We worked too hard on that part, so let us not mess with it. We can change anything else”

4.    The reviewer has a potential opportunity to contribute to the project and is likely to make full use of an idea that has merit

Many of these points dwell on the personal behavior of people and some of them border on ego and selfishness. It is not a perfect world; and the intelligent ones have to be reasonable and expect some such elements in every professional. The really intelligent ones take this thought and leverage it for the success of the business – or any other endeavor you are part of. Now that is one more reason to use the ‘Fresh Eyes Peer Review’!

Knowledge Management for the New Generation

 

The ‘new generation’ of IT services – now that is a tagline we hear very often in various forums, within a company as well as external. It sure sounds flashy, and the phrase even gives us some kind of a self-assurance for the future, although a sizeable bunch of listeners don’t usually get the full implications of the term.

All right, I am not about to start a lecture on the origin of the term or what the real implications are for the business, but I want to drive a little bit of thought on certain aspects you are probably familiar with. ‘New generation’ does include new technology, new service lines and new standards for quality, but what is perhaps most significant is that there is a considerable amount of new people – new faces at the workplace.

With new faces on the workforce come new duties for the people behind each organization. The most obvious, of course, is to ensure that the new recruits are brought up to speed in terms of technical expertise. But the more important challenge is to make sure they are a perfect fit to the culture of the organization. This extends to how we deal with clients, how we manage external relations and how we project the image of the organization in the public eye.

A new employee – whether a fresher or a lateral hire – would have a set process in his mind. To modify the process according to the organization’s attitude, one would need to depend on precedent – a history of what was done in a similar situation. To open that door, there is only one key – Knowledge Management. Whether that knowledge comes from a veteran’s memory or a classified approved document, depends on the maturity of Knowledge Management in the organization.

Life runs on Knowledge Management

When you drove up to office today, you didn’t just trust your instinct to tell you which turn to take or which intersection to take it at. You may have either depended on your knowledge of the routine, or gone by the signboards and markers. In the bigger picture, ever since the first explorers sailed back home after discovering new lands, how did their successors know what route to take on the next voyage? The maps and charts they painstakingly drew up would have provided guidance for the people who followed their paths. On the road, we were able to clearly demarcate the points and make it easier for travelers of future generations, although this wasn’t directly possible at sea. Perhaps we are looking at one of the first instances of effective Knowledge Management.

For a long time, Knowledge Management has been tied to the idea of “not re-inventing the wheel”. Naturally, people need to make mistakes to learn the best way to do things – remember Edison’s 999 ways of not making a good light bulb and one way to make a good one. But then, the next time anyone wanted to make a light bulb, he/she wouldn’t have to go through all the 999 mistakes to reach the 1000th method. If Edison – or any other inventor - has made a note of what is good and what is bad, the new inventor is able to safely steer through and reach his goal.

In most industries, and especially in the IT industry, a lot of energy often goes into repetitive efforts to solve the same problem over and over again. Where and how does this loss occur? Let’s take a detailed look at it in a future editorial, but for now just keep this in mind: You are spending energy to solve the problem. So why not document the result and save equal amounts of effort at multiple points in future?