Blog
via Microservices architecture: What the gurus say about it
Great article from my perspective.
Looks like herbertograca has more interesting things to read about architecture and development approaches.
During my work career as a manager and leader I saw the biggest mistake ordinary done by the young people:
After a mistake, they try to hide it or lie to me.
Doing that, they are breaking the most important fundamental thing of any relationship including work:
Trust is a fundamental thing which makes things work.
Let me provide some arguments if it’s not clear:
What I see: young people don’t understand that if they’ve created a problem in some technical or organizational area their liying pushes the problem to the new level and breaks any relationships.
The consequences of lying often outweigh the cost of mistake. They become irreversible.
As a result, let me share the message with all young people to make them avoid the worst behavioral pattern there are planning to use:
Don’t lie even in small things. Be brave to admit your mistakes and take responsibility for them.
Don’t be afraid to entrust yourself to people and they will trust you.
Follow these rule even in front of a tough manager or leader. It will show your strength twice.
Once you will lie – your reputation will be hard to restore.
Be careful with that.
During my work, I’ve made many interviews with the candidates.
Most of them were for my projects.
It’s a really important fact since it gave me an understanding of my mistakes and successes: I’ve worked closely with the people I’ve selected.
After all these experience I want to share some of my conclusions about interviews:
Finally, I want to highlight the following conclusions I made:
The best check for the candidate is a real job.
Unfortunately, exists such type of people who can speak nice and pass all your questions, but the real job is hard for them. Anyway, be ready that all issues will appear during the real work with the candidate.
The recommendation of the candidate is highly important. Especially from a trusted person.
Try to get feedback about the candidate from the past co-workers. It will give you really strong arguments for your decision.
Trust your feelings and intuition.
A big piece of our experience is hidden inside of intuition. Some candidates will cause you to doubt, although all questions will be well answered. Don’t ignore your intuition. I prefer to have one more interview later when the reason of doubt will be clarified and should be checked. After some time I follow the rule – I reject the candidate if I have doubts.
Listen to each other! Good luck with the interviews!
Time after time, it’s the strong feeling growing in me:
Processes are much less important than people who set and handle them. Even more: we’re speaking processes, but meaning people.
As far as I see, the process is just a tool created by the exact group of people to achieve defined goals.
From such point of view, the right process is just the implementation of the visions of the right people.
I think, that is the root cause why the processes in different companies has different level of success.
From another side the quality of a process and achieved results depending on the people who perform it.
As a result, even similar processes can produce different results. It makes hard to reapply the process to another environment.
I think the company culture plays a big role here.
This point brings to live another old idea to remove the human factor to make the process stable.
It makes sense, but what I see everytime I want to implement it
It’s really amazing how many efforts do you need to make an human-independent process.
Probably the cost of this approach is the biggest factor why it’s not applied everywhere and we’re still working with human-based processes.
In general, there are a lot of open questions. Some of them I want solve:
In my previous post, I’ve described some initial thoughts about employees Communities. At the bottom of the article, I’ve identified the list of problems we’ve met during our long way to build effective Communities.
Let me share now some solutions we’ve found. I hope it will save you time if you’ll decide to make similar things.
I’ll start with Meetup since it plays a really big role in Community processes: it makes possible to share knowledge, select the most professional employees, identify trends and directions for investigations, etc.
So
What is the best format of the meetup?
In the beginning, we’ve selected “training”-like format:
After some meetups, we’ve realized that the selected format doesn’t work. Reasons:
After all of these facts, we’ve made our key conclusions:
Meetup is not a training
The key goal of the Meetup is not to educate or train, but give a communication point to discuss and share ideas, knowledge, ask for help or consultation, etc.
Meetup should be easy to perform. No prepation needed!
It should be easy to share knowledge. Even small topics make sense for the meetup. No preparation is needed. You need to share the knowledge/questions/results which you already have!
Meetup should be informal
Meetup should have “open” atmosphere which should grow smoothly with community size. Only motivated employees should participate. No needs to grow the community by employees who are not motivated. The community should grow naturally. Even 4 employees enough to start.
Meetup should be short and regular.
We decided to move with 30-minutes meetup per week or two. Short meetups easy to perform since you need not prepare different content, they are not boring and don’t need your time during the working day. Regular meetups provide the feeling of community, live process. It motivates to participate and makes it clear. It makes the people organized.
The last note for today:
Meetup should be online
The offline format is not scalable and works just if you have a single office. In other cases, you need to be scalable to involve motivated people from the whole company, record it if needed, etc. It’s even simple to organize. We’ve tried to organize mixed (offline+online) meetups, but it’s increasing complexity: it’s hard to speak with the community, if you provide both options people prefer to join in online mode, you need to prepare the room, projector, microphones. As I said before – it should easy, not like this.
Don’t worry if you think that you will lose some special feelings in an online format. In the IT world, you need to be ready to communicate online. It’s a really unique case if the team is not shared. Start to work online ASAP.
Good luck! Don’t hesitate to contact me if you’ve any question.
The emotion of this week:
Even one positive feedback can give you enough energy to move to your goal.
As a result, don’t skimp on a good word. Say it even “in credit”!
Perhaps it will serve as the basis for someone’s goals or dreams.
P.S. don’t hesitate to say “Thank you” at least 😉
In the last years, it becomes clear to me that the world was changed. The cool book “The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly confirmed my vision and structured it. Let me put some key changes which amaze me even now.
To be honest, I’m not happy with some aspects since I was born in another world, but it’s totally clear that we need to accept and follow the changes to be successful.
To be a working part of human-machine interactions we’re creating, not only things we do, but we ourselves should follow the rules:
I hope we don’t lose our humanity in this challenging and stressfully world.
P.S. I recommend the book from above. It provides useful ideas in a clear and simple way.
Before I’ll start, let me describe our company: it’s an international IT-company with 900+ employees, providing software development and IT-consulting.
Around 2 years ago I got the opportunity to boost the technical level of the company.
A not easy challenge, but it was a great opportunity to try my approaches and visions.
In the beginning, it was different kind of questions to solve. Let me share the most important of them:
I don’t remember how it happened, but a wonderful answer to all these questions came from my subconscious: let’s build communities for each work area: Business Analysis, Java Development, JS Development, DevOps, Quality Assurance and so on.
Let’s clarify my understanding of the Community:
Community – is an open informal group of employees who are interested in knowledge sharing in a specific work area.
Let me highlight few words:
Open – it means that all employees can be a part of the community. No restrictions related to experience. Why? Each person can be helpful! Sometimes proactivity and creativity of the young people are vital for the work process.
Informal – it should be a friendly and homelike atmosphere between community members. Why? It should easy to share knowledge and even small achievements. Members should be loyal to the experience of each other and ready to help. There is no community without easy communications.
Interested – means not-indifferent and proactive. Why it’s important? An indifferent employee has no energy to get or share the experience. Such employees are more like zeros for the community. In all cases, they are welcome. Important note: be sure they don’t demotivate other community members. Such kind of people exists as well.
So how communities will help with the questions from above? Let me answer in a different order and elaborate community idea.
Let’s begin with regular Meetups where community members will share knowledge, discuss trends, new approaches, problems, solutions. Here it will be possible to identify the most professional and proactive employees for other activities. Additionally, we can select the most experienced member to help with community leading. Let’s call them Community Lead. The most regular meetups members will form the Community Core. This formation will be really useful with performing of the most important and complex work.
It will be possible during meetups discussions. Especially during discussions of the new trends and existing problems. Additionally, we can send regular Newsletter with the review of existing trends, useful resources and so on. Responsible member will get new experience and share it with the whole community. All of these will cover one big goal: Aligning of the company with future trends, but it’s not all. Community efforts can be applied to cover more areas: mentoring, training of employees, providing consultations and help other employees and projects, knowledge mining (research) and sharing, organizing of technical events (i.e. Hackathons), Sales Support and so on.
With the structure from above and regular activities (i.e. Meetups, Newsletters etc), Communities will become an integral and permanent part of the company. After some time it will be possible to identify, describe and support related processes to make them stable and effective.
The secret is that Communities are helpful not only for the company but especially for the employees themselves: they get new skills, new experience, help, field for creativity. Just for free! As a result, the company can pay just for extra efforts like community leading, meetups organizing, newsletter preparation, but as a result get a really great profit and help.
I hope the concept of communities has become more understandable and simple.
Unfortunately, the greatest difficulties in creating something are rooted in details.
The devil is in the details
Let’s highlight the top of problems met on my way to communities building.
Like in movies, let’s answer on these questions in the next posts. See you!
By the way: let me wish you a happy and prosperous Happy Year!
What does come to mind if you need to asses your colleague? What areas do you usually measure?
Let me mention some of them:
During my practice, I’ve detected one more important option.
But let me describe the situation I’ve met:
Due to some reasons, it was no daily stand-ups on the project. One of my team members worked for a long time on the task. The task was quite complex with different hidden stones inside.
The problem was that he provided his status only on my request. Results were hard to check and he always shifted the deadlines. As a result, after a month of work, when it was an internal assessment it was hard to evaluate his efforts and skills. He was like an invisible man for me. It was not clear how professional he is.
Another colleague was confused as well. She said a great phrase:
He has low VISIBILITY.
Yep. That is the perfect word! I’m using it now for some set of professional approaches.
After thinking let me summarize what I mean under Visibility:
Visibility is the ability of a person to provide timely and tangible information about his current work results.
Tangible means that the results can be easily checked: it could be a pull request, test case, user story, demonstration, charts, video recording, report, email etc.
Note that results of work can include even the list of blockers provided by email.
Problems we meet are the results of our work as well.
Timely means not right before the deadline but provided in an iterative way, right after receiving any tangible achievement.
What is the profit from visibility?
For the manager and the whole team I see the following points:
For the employee itself:
Why Visibility is so important? Let’s imagine that the profits from above are revoked.
In the context of the situation from above, I’ve made additional conclusions:
Daily standup increases the visibility for the whole team. Avoiding this practice badly reflected on each team member.
The manager should describe to the team how to become visible. Keep it in mind that visibility is not usual for some people.
High visibility is a part of high professionalism!
Be visible!
You are angry – means, you are not right.
I wish to remember it in discussion.
SB's 