Do you want to be "Transformer" or a "Lost Soul" or a "Fence Sitter" this new year ?

I had written about the topic of change earlier. No matter how much i feel i have mastered dealing with Change, something new always takes me by surprise. Irrespective of anyone's personal preference about Change, today's workplace reality is that in the end, there is not much choice but to embrace change. The choice is only if you want to do it Half-heartedly or completely with full devotion.

I had recently read Vineet Nayar's Employees First Customers Second for the second time in the month gone by. I would rate this book as epic in bringing about a positive change in the organization. It questions the traditional way of running an enterprise and shows how a management which is devoted and caring for its employees can bring about a change that’s not only makes employees happy but also increases the company's bottom lines. Some of facts that this book questions and provide a successful alternatives (proven on field) include-

- The greatest value for a Knowledge based organization is brought about by the employees who deal directly with Customer in the group and not by a CEO sitting in his fancy office. It is important for the organizations to have clarity on where the core Value Zone lies. It reminds me of one of the blog posts i wrote a while back on What is your Touch-Time as a Software Tester ?

- The traditional hierarchy followed in Organizations in which an Employee is accountable to his Manager is a farce as far as Knowledge economy is concerned. Every responsible soul in the Organization should be accountable to the value Zone in the Organization. In the current Knowledge economy, we have somehow taken the current Organization structures for granted. After all, How can Organizations achieve the profits of today by following the age-old hierarchical system

- One cannot reach Point B in Organization (or Life) without knowing where Point A is. Point A is of course the Status Quo and Point B is the vision. More often than not we fail to capture the Point A correctly. Having an unbiased picture of point A is important to succeed. People tend to get so much lost in past glory that they sometimes fail to find the opportunities to improve in the current situations. While we should respect the past glory, It is important to break that past image if we were to maintain our competitive advantage.

- Trust is an important element in driving any change. Employees will not completely trust you unless and until you, as a driver of the change, is transparent in your dealings. Transparency helps create that culture for change.

- A mention from the book- The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations . Most companies function like eight-legged spiders "Cut off one leg of the Spider, you have a Seven legged unstable Spider. Cut off the head, you have a dead Spider. But Cut off the arm of a Starfish and it will grow a new one. Not only that, but the severed arm can grow an entirely new body. Starfish can achieve this feat, because unlike spiders, they are decentralized; every major organ is replicated across each arm."

- Any small idea can create an ocean of change and enable a company to enter an entirely new performance zone, no matter what the current situation may be. These ideas, practices or people who originate them are called as blue ocean droplets after the book Blue Ocean Strategy .

- A change initiative can’t be termed as successful if affected people are not onboard. It is generally not possible to have everyone Onboard right from the day the change was introduced. When he first began to drive the changes in his organization, Vineer Nayar understood that not all people would come on board immediately and in fact there are three different groups of people depending largely on the way they embrace change-
Transformers: Transformers are the people who were just waiting for someone to initiate the change and they join the bandwagon almost immediately. They are the ones who are usually aware of shortcomings in the current environment but probably were not the influential enough to drive the change themselves earlier on. They are the people who not only embrace change but also are ready with suggestions, ideas and raise their hand to implement some to completion.

Lost Souls: They are the people who would never support any kind of change. They always have this negativity surrounding them and they somehow are never able to lift themselves from their hopeless state. They somehow believe that every new initiative is an eye wash from the management or the organization. Whenever the new idea is suggested they would simply go ahead and dismiss that not only in their minds but also knowingly and unknowingly try to spread their negativity by airing their views.

Fence sitters: These are the third bunch of people, who generally are reluctant to share their views, rarely would ask the questions and would rather play a wait and watch game. They may not openly criticize the change but won’t either embrace it with wholeheartedness. When asked their opinions, they are likely to say nice things rather than be upfront honest. They would closely watch "Transformers" and the "Lost Souls" and may even change their opinions in short time. In any change initiatives, such people are usually in the majority. They get easily influenced in either direction.

In my dealing with change, i find this classification just apt and it is very useful in understanding the dynamics and even the acceptance of change. One example from the past that comes to mind was around the time when the IT automation of Indian Railways was being introduced, that was indeed the massive way in which the Indian Railways operated. Being the largest employers in the world, driving any changes to work processes was never easy. I remember there were technocrats and visionaries who were favoring the idea, then there were employee unions who were fearing the attrition due to automation of Railway operations who were vocal about criticizing the initiative, they were the "Lost Souls". Then there were many people who were lured by potential benefits of new changes to the customers as well as the employees (Learning new job skills etc.) but at the same time distracted by Lost Souls. These were "Fence Sitters". It was good for the customers and eventually the country that such a change was made. And this change was possible because a lot of "Fence Sitters" and eventually "Lost Souls" joined the "Transformers".

So eventually with every defining change, over a period of time, "Transformers" becomes a majority with most of the "Fence-Sitters" going up the level and the "Lost Souls" either change their minds and embrace change or fade out completely from the scene.

What do you want to become this new year- "a Transform", "a Lost Soul" or "a Fence Sitter" ?
Wishing you a Transformational New Year 2011.

Do you commit to OAD while testing ?

One of the concepts that Robin Sharma talks about in his book Greatness Guide is that of OAD. OAD is nothing but Obsessive Attention to Details . He uses this term in the context of Customer Service. He says-

leadership isn't about your position, it's about the way you show up each day, If your yard or home is well- organized, I'll bet your life is well-organized. If you are attentive to details like the birthdays of your friends and sending thank you notes after every meeting, my guess is that you are attentive to the details around your big projects and best opportunities. So pay attention to the details. Sweat the small stuff (like crazy). Commit to OAD: Obsessive Attention to Detail the best people and organizations do; Because the little things grow into the big things.

Customers are always the one paying great deal of detail in assessing the Service or the Product they are using. There is perceivably no limit to the level of details they can go and form an opinion about the offering. It only becomes imperative for the organizations to be exhibiting that level of detail in its operations.
Isn’t Attention to details a key trait when you are testing a Software product ? It sure is.

The degree of good testing a tester does often depends upon the level of details one’s mind can traverse through. Taking a leaf out from learnings out of Robin's words, "Just" Attention to details while testing is not enough. What is needed to stay competitive in today's world where Customer is like a god is to commit to "Obsessive" Attention to details. Someone once said- "God lies in details". In Software Testing context, isn’t it true that "Bugs lies in details" ?

The word "Obsessive" usually sound like negative in work context but i feel it is synonyms with the word "Passionate". A mind Passionate about Software Testing notices even the minor details, no bug escapes an alert mind. Unless a tester is obsessively detailed oriented, the bugs are bound to be migrated for customer to notice.

Be Fearless. Commit to Obsessive Attention to details!

Breaking the Shackles...Beat that "Thai Elephant" Syndrome in you

While reading Project Management- A Comedy of errors by Prasanna Kumar, i came across the below story-

When a Thai Elephant is small, its trainer ties one end of the rope around the elephant's leg and the other end to a rigid pole. The baby elephant tries to sever this rope and set itself free, but the rope is too strong for a baby elephant. Eventually it gives up.
Even after Elephant becomes a three tonner, the mahout continues to use the same rope. The reason is, as a baby elephant it is conditioned to think that it cannot break the rope. The Elephant does not realize the awesome power it now has.

This story is not only true of Thai Elephants only but also has a striking resemblance with the way us humans think and act. I feel one of the reasons why people fail to take risk or choose to stay safe in life is because of the passive thinking that is strangled like the giant leg of Thai Elephant.

So, the next time your mind wanders and tells you that you are not capable to do something, just ask yourself- "Am i strangled from my past thoughts like the Thai Elephant ?"
Nothing is impossible! If you think you can, you can! Beat your fears, Insecurities and back yourself to do the new.
Just break-away from those imaginary shackles from the past.

Wish you a Merry Christmas!

Sense of Urgency- A Key skill in the Professional's toolkit

The Story:
Vineet Nayar, the HCL CEO -in his book Employees First Customers Second , narrates one story of his encounter with a race car driver during one of his flights-

As we sipped a glass of wine before dinner, he told me about an incident from his past. It seems he had been in the middle of a race when his brakes failed. he asked if I ever had that experience. "No", I said, "What did you do?"
"What do you think my options were? " he asked.
I thought of a number of possibilities, but i really had no idea.
"Most drivers would do one of two things," he said "First, they try to get the brakes to work. Or ,second, they slow down. The first option distracts the driver and puts him at risk of a crash. The second option makes him a hazard to other drivers and also puts him at risk of a crash."
"So what should you do?" I asked.
"Speed up"," he said. "Accelerate past the other cars and then take whatever action is necessary."

Doesn’t this story sound like reminiscent of what we experience mostly at the workplaces ? After reading the first part of the story, my mind teleports to the days when every task that one handle is of highest priority and at the same time each task is unrelated, of completely different nature. Add to this, if you have some pressing things at home to attend to, then you have a cracker of a day at hand. To me, that for sure sounds like a case of driving a car whose brakes have failed and during such days you often wonder where is this car going to eventually end.
The second part of above story does suggests an rather out of box solution. Speeding up is usually the last thing to think of in that situation. The question that crossed my mind is - What prompts a human being for any action when in crisis or even when attending to Important things ? The more i think about it, the more my thinking gets skewed towards one trait called as "Sense of Urgency" in this situation.

What is Sense of Urgency ?
ehow.com defines Sense of Urgency as - "A sense of urgency is the attitude and process of treating key business or personal matters as if one's life depended on it. It is determination to stay focused on results and deadlines until the task or project is completed."
A Sense of Urgency is something that makes one work harder with the desired focus to work towards achieving your goals. People who imbibe Sense of Urgency gets things done faster and it is often a positive differentiator in life.

Does Inculcating Sense of Urgency help you work better ?
Employees who do not possess Sense of Urgency,
- Are perceived as having Casual Approach towards work.
- Often tend to miss deadlines.
- Miss the vital instructions that could help them do the tasks better.
- Often miss out on competition.
- Have their own ideas of work performance and are happy satisfying that.
- Are often at the receiving end of reminders to complete the tasks.
- Find it hard to understand/meet Work commitments.
- Tend to get easily satisfied with the Status Quo even if it is of average quality.
- Do not generally think beyond the obvious to complete the work.

Keeping the above points in mind, the answer to the question- "Does Inculcating Sense of Urgency help you test better ?" to me is, Why not ? For Example-Take a look at any successful Testing effort, you will find that it follows a well-defined mission. A mission is that end goal that is kept in mind and which is determinant of success for a test engineer. All along when a person is testing, he/she tend to utilize the various thinking patterns- System thinking, Creative thinking to come up with the consistent stream of test ideas. Testing outputs are often always time bound. It is a well-known fact that testing if done without consideration of risk can be an infinite activity. It is the Sense of Urgency that helps a test engineer maintain his focus, help prioritize the tests and do what is best for the moment. Testing is often done in Timeboxes. Unless a test possess required Sense of Urgency in addition to Testing skills, the testing would often tend to lose the foresight and will spill over the Timebox.

How can i inculcate Sense of Urgency ?
In the book The Road Ahead , Bill Gates said that a secret to Microsoft success is that the employees always think of themselves to be in the losing side, and this makes them strive to be number one everyday. This attitude creates a sense of urgency which makes them work hard to survive in the highly competitive environment of IT industry.

All along i have known one way to Inculcate Sense of Urgency and that is to consider the current task at hand as "THE MOST IMPORTANT" task as if your job is dependent on the successful completion of that. Try out, it works if done honestly.
So, go into the next work session as if it is the most important session in your professional career.

Is Sense of Urgency always a positive trait ?
Today i was reading one of the recent blogs from Vineet Nayar- Speed Kills. Slow is Fast. It presents quite a reasonable view on how in today's world, when the expectations are sky high, when decision needs to be made in split seconds, the age old notion of decision making by considering the balanced view (all possibilities) of any situation seems just that- age old. Surface thinkers are vastly gaining prominence. In this competitive world, what seems to be lacking is someone taking comprehensive view of any situation and come up with an appropriate views to handle stuff at hand. The point is that Sense of Urgency does help speed up things but in the mad race sometimes the very reason why something is being done a takes back seat. Do read this blog to gain that precious perspective.

What is your experience regarding the "Sense of Urgency" trait ? Do share your views and comments.

Help Chandru!

If you have not already visited Pradeep Soundararajan's blogpost- Help Chandru live his testing dreams! , I would really request you to once go through the same and provide any help you can.

Chandru is a fellow tester from India who has been diagosed with Blood Cancer at a young age. From what i know from Pradeep, this guy is a fighter and is not going to give up anytime.
Would urge you, Dear reader to come forward provide any help you can. Afterall, it only proves how closeknit, responsible, sensitive and committed is the Testing community.

For more details visit the blog

How well do you know your team ?- Asking the questions that matter

With most of the work in today's world getting more collaborative in nature, with the world around us getting flatter by the day, with the teams around us getting more and more diverse, the true success of the team's endeavors more often than not lies in the answer to this question- "How well do you know your team ?"

We live in a "Faceless" work era. Looking back, there are several instances where i have been involved in doing business with the people successfully over years without even having to see or meet them. This may have sounded very astonishing probably during the generation when my parents were working but now every other employee might have a same experience to share. But whatever it is- i am still amazed at the ability of human beings to work together and achieve success together without having to see each other and without understanding the underlying emotions, with just the strands of work sharing that common goal connecting them together. In this situation, the success could not be taken for granted and is not assured unless you know the team members better.

In the question- "How well do you know your team ?" the word "you" does not necessarily denote a leader, though people without effort tend to believe that it’s only the leader who has to know the team to ably get the work done. Well, it’s true for sure but the "You" (in that question) actually represents everyone in the team irrespective of their designations and roles people play in the team. It’s not only in the case of Self-managed teams that team members need to know each other but also the teams that function under autocratic setup where a Single leader takes majority of decisions. In such a setup, even though a Leader takes majority of decisions and setups up the strategy, the plans tend to remain as "Paper Plans" unless they are executed well. It is the team dynamics that is one of the important factor that decides how well the plan gets executed.

I have myself been in position of a "designated" Leader for quite a few projects and my experience suggests to me that understanding the team members is an important dimension to the leadership and without spending adequate efforts in this direction all the success as a leader is superficial to me. People are not machines, afterall. One thing i hate inherently is calling or referring to people as "Resources". People are the most important assets in a Knowledge economy. To me, "Resources" is the term best used to represent things such as Hardware, Software etc. that helps People in achieving overall mission. Referring to people as mere "Resources" is no less than being a derogatory phrase to me. I think for a leader one of the foremost task is to know the people who he works for (i.e. his team), and the people who help him achieve the overall objectives.

In this post and subsequent posts on this i would try and mention the attempts or techniques that i have employed in my experience to know the team members better. Hoping to start a meaningful dialog with readers to understand their views on this important but often neglected topic.

The Technique- "Asking the Questions that matter" :
The technique that i wanted to talk about in this blog is as simple as Asking the Questions that matter to the people you as a leader work for. I keep using the phrase "to the people you as a leader work for" while describing the work sphere of a leader because i firmly believe that gone are the days when the perception of leadership was that people work for you. We live in a age when people who you lead are often more smart than you are in many aspects and without their presence the existence of a leader is zilch.

As a part of "Asking the Questions that matter" technique, below is the excerpt of an email that i usually send to people who i have started to work with as a leader or even to those who i have been working for some time. I learned this technique in one of my trainings at Stephen Covey long back, though i have actually customized some parts to my needs-
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Hi (Name of the Person),
As we work together, I’d like to know more about you so I can help you to grow and develop and make your highest and best contribution. Please take a few minutes to respond to the following questions.

• What kind of work have you always loved doing?
• Is there anything about your job that you dislike ?
• What job-related opportunities are you passionate about and are looking forward to?
• What do you feel (skills etc.) you are really good at?
• What are the areas you think you need to grow and develop further ? What opportunities do you foresee for growth and development here?
• Is there a way you think your work environment can be further improved?
• What significant contribution do you strive to make in your current role?

I would like you to treat this conversation as confidential and respond as much as you honestly know and after I get your responses, I’d like to sit down together and discuss this further.

Please let me know if you can send me your responses by (Whatever is the deadline) or sooner. If you need more time, let me know.

Regards,
Anuj

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How do people generally respond to this ?
In my experience, the people who receive this email, can respond in one of the four ways-
1. Sensing an opportunity to let the leader know his or her aspirations, the person does best to respond with the correct information to the best of his or her knowledge.
2. People generally will be defensive and would not write anything controversial that is completely out of the norm and give superficial replies.
3. People vent out their frustrations and write stern remarks.
4. People do not respond at all.

How do you interpret the response ?
An experienced leader will easily recognize under which of the above four categories do the people's response falls under and for others, it might take a bit of application of common sense to figure out the category of the response.

In my assessment, whatever the team member respond, it’s a winning situation for a leader. Below are my interpretations of the above responses-

1. Of course, this is the best response. It gives a crucial insights for a leader into his team's liking and dislikes, aspirations etc. The responses form an ideal platform for further meaningful discussions and help in effectively marrying the work priorities with team member's greatest strengths and aspirations.

2. The second response will be easier to figure out and the effective leader will align the follow-up discussion and dig deeper into the real issues. It will require asking more focused questions face-to-face. But generally the good responses from such discussions come only after the required trust has been established between the leader and the team. It might be good for the leader to judge and figure out the exact reasons why the team member was not open to him in first place and work to rectify any problems.

3. The third response is an obvious indicator for the leader that something is seriously wrong that needs to be addressed with higher priority. Also, the leader should appreciate the honesty of the person and not take the remarks personally. The leader needs to be displaying genuine empathy is follow-up discussions.

4. Regarding the fourth response, no news is not always the good news. This may also indicate the lack of basic trust that is not allowing the person to freely share his views with the leader. Again a meaningful follow-up discussion (may be many) help to pin down the real issues.

This technique is helpful in the sense that it gives a platform for a good follow-up talk. This helps provide a right kind of start and if done at the start of relationship, helps build the necessary trust with the people. But bear in mind that such trust is usually not so strong. Unless meaningful, genuine follow-up discussions happen and people get to see the results, such trust will diminish sooner than later.

I hope to share few more techniques to getting to know your team based on your responses to this post. Please do share your thoughts.

My foray into Weekend Testing

I should have forayed with Weekend Testing a while ago but somehow could not. Its not wise to go into the excuse mode as to why i was not able to yet, so i wont take the discussion there. But what i want to be focusing here is my experience into Weekend testing.
The challenge posed to participants was to figure out which is best platform/tool to conduct the Weekend testing session. The setup for Weekend Testing Session# 48 was by itself challenging in the sense that it asked for finding out the best solution by testing the new contender tool (Old, tried and tested one being “Skype”). The new contender was a Real Time Collaboration tool called Pligus . I wont go into the details of the features of this tool but would certainly like to share my quick learnings out of the session-

• I had realized earlier but now experienced first-hand that Weekend Testing is quite an unique platform in which Testers irrespective of their Geographies and cultures get together in a session which is devoid of any Office Politics, without any interruptions to focus only one thing, which is Pure Testing.

• I had been involved quite much in Competitive Software Analysis in the past and this session refreshed my experience. The prime relearning that i had was to compare the two or more Software Product in question per feature. One way to quickly do these session to decompose the features of the product that you already know and try and find the same/similar features in the other product under question. As a next step, try and find any other enhanced features in the product under test.

• I revived the art of questioning. Was glad to see so many questions being ask from all quarters as soon as the challenge was given to the virtual teams. Questioning helped refine everyone's approach towards the task at hand and also at times added to confusion as the questions kept coming from all the participants. But i guess this confusion is useful in the end result and is not totally avoidable.

• My current Job profile of late did not allow me to test as much so this session was very much redeeming for me.

I could not attend the entire session because of some prior commitment but still could gather many positives as listed above. Looking forward for more such sessions.