One Team One Goal

Have you heard anywhere that a reputed software company hires a person who has experience only in the restaurant world?

Yes.That wonder has happened. Does not that sound crazy? Is the recruitment manager a crazy fellow? Well, let us go back in time.

It is a quite famous and middle level restaurant at the heart of the city that is doing a fairly good service to the society as well as to its internal people. The owner of the restaurant is a courageous and greedy personality who wants take the restaurant to the next level. As he wanted to make sure to deliver quality and tasteful food to the customers, unlike other restaurants he recruited a food quality assurance person as well. And since the current manager resigning from the work, the owner recruited a new employee for the very same position.

The new restaurant manager is an enthusiastic and enormously positive person who committed to take the performance and customer impact of the restaurant to a new level. He found some of the old ways of functioning were not very effective in producing high quality results. He made a few changes there.

Before the new manager joined

• Chefs were fully and only responsible for preparing the food items.
• Food quality assurance personal will give his concerns and those will be fixed by chef team.
• Once the food quality is assured, the responsibility will be handed over to the delivery team.(servers/ take away assistants)
• No collaborative working, lack of mutual understanding among teams
• Delivery of customer orders took fairly higher amount of time.
• Quality assurance check for food items were done at the end of preparation only.
• If any of the category members missing, the whole delivery process would be on hold.

After the changes made by the new manager,

• Still the chef team taking the responsibility for the preparation. But a highly collaborative environment and cross-functional team has been established. Whenever there is a high amount of food preparation work pending, the QA person and the server/delivery assistants also will be involved in food preparation.  And if the delivery person is not available or if there is an urgent requirement, a member from chef team will act as a server/delivery boy for the time being.

• Time to time Workers were switched from team to team to be trained in all the areas and to understand other teams’ work aspects. Eg: A person from chef team will act as a server one day a week.

• The above changes made the employees become multi-skilled. It improved the performance of the restaurant highly as well as most of the employees were rewarded with increments, bonuses and other benefits for their dedication and going extra mile work attitude.

• Highly collaborative working culture established. Members from each team were able to share their problems or struggles with others which created a better understanding and helped to build better relationship among team members.

• No of visitors getting increased day by day and the restaurant started to soar high. It was awarded as one of the most favorite restaurants by people in the city and it got the award for the happiest working place too.
• Needless to say that the company was experiencing a financial gain which was never seen in the history of the restaurant.
• Newspapers started talking about this magical place and the key person who was behind the scene.

Now, as the IT companies facing the same kind of issue- lack of collaboration among teams, some smart companies want to appoint the new restaurant manager as a consultant to do training and awareness sessions on collaborative working which termed as “DevOp culture” in the IT industry.

How can we develop a success story in IT with the lessons we learnt in the restaurant’s growth?

• Even though Development, QA and operations team specializes in one area, all teams should have some knowledge on other areas as well.
• Eg: When operations team get an issue from the client, they should be able to find at least where it goes wrong exactly (not in detail but an overall idea) whether it is a database issue or code issue like that.

• Dev team should have a basic understanding on areas like deployment, monitoring

• Dev team should have a good understanding on network and security issues. So when the product is implemented    better validations could be added to prevent issues like cross-site scripting attack.

• Collaboration among teams is very important. Develop better relationship with in the team and among teams will speed up process as well as it will improve the product quality.

• Human resources are the vital assets of an IT company not the technology or processes it adheres. Providing a happy and stress-free working environment is a key factor in getting the maximum output from employees. The more the communication gets effective the more the conflicts among teams could be resolved/avoided.

• Play different roles time to time will not only make the people multi-skilled but it also will make them understand other teams’ viewpoints.

•  Developers can do QA work at times. Or they can help operations team on the    deployment.

•  QA team people may collaborate with the development team to get an idea of how the implementation work is done.

• Attitude of all of the teams plays an important role in getting the work done and make sure it is in a high quality. Rather than passing the responsibility to someone else or some other team, the collective responsibility and ownership for the product is very important.

•  When there is an issue after production-release, not only the operations team but also the development and QA team   should take the responsibility of resolving the issue in a shortest possible time frame. Collaboration and mutual understanding should be there.