Friday, March 7, 2014

Winning Together



How do we want to spend time working on cross functional teams on a project? ‘A project’ is a key term. When the outcome of ‘a project’, the product - ships, and when the customer uses it – they look at the product as a whole. They do not care who developed, which team from which geography contributed to which feature etc. The perception one product. The life of this product and reputation of the company depends on whether it works or not. Features, functionality, usability, support and documentation – all of these factors contribute to one goal – user’s experience with the product.

From conception to deliverable, ‘a product’ is chunked into multiple components for development and testing by sometimes hundreds of skilled engineers. Everyone works to make their part perfect. And take of making all the parts work together as expected. Someone steps in to test if things are working as expected. And someone starts documenting the functionality to enable the user navigate through or use the product without going through much frustration.

There might be issues and glitches everywhere. Of course we are all human. So when we find an issue of a glitch, try to bring it up and help the owner fix. If we don’t and start finding faults at the last minute, instead of spending time in resolving the problem for a better quality, we spend more time in finding reasons to defend ourselves. How does that help us being productive? We lose track of the common goal, and start chasing our individual interest that may not contribute to a common goal.

It is common knowledge that team work is all about working together, complementing and helping each other to succeed as a team. To achieve a common goal.

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