One of my dearest team members went on vacation recently. We’re a small firm, so a colleague stepped up to lead the engagement over the two weeks. Suddenly, we found ourselves with an interesting opportunity to examine our own process. What was working and what wasn’t working? Was our communication and tracking meeting the client and team needs to drive a common understanding? What could we do differently?
I wrote a LinkedIn post recently that referenced “dogfooding”, and this was one of my epiphanies that had little to do with my colleague’s well-earned vacation and a lot to do with showing the world that you eat your own dogfood. But before I summarize what we thought of our own dog food, let me set the stage.
My team has been collaborating closely with a new client on their highest priority technology project. As with many of our client situations, we hopped into a wildfire of a project with a Charles Dickens mentality (“it was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”) and a passion for getting customer experience right. It’s one of our favorite spaces to walk in, collaborate and contribute.
Together with the client and third-party partners, we have taken major leaps over a few months. End users are happy, call centers are functioning better than previously, migration process and roles are clearer. The technology implementation is advancing first-time-right at an ever quicker pace.
Despite this, we are under relentless pressure from the client to get migrations done faster. It’s a constant juggle to keep the project moving fast enough to succeed, but in a controlled fashion in which we manage the process and emphasize first-time-right for a great end user experience when the technology upgrade occurs.
After sending my colleague off with the request to please not check-in while on vacation, I went about the two weeks listening hard and trusting the team. The team members wanted to do a few things differently – not according to plan, and not always perfectly. But some ideas were magic, and others we learned from.
Here are our dogfooding lessons:
1. There’s no substitute for shared understanding and a common goal. None. This isn’t new – it’s not from a methodology, agile or otherwise. There’s also no substitute for effective communication with everyone – individually, in groups, by voice or conversation, in writing – to make sure of that understanding and to recognize work well done. We all think we do it regularly, but check yourself and make sure everyone is on board and is recognized for their contributions to keep motivation high along the way. My colleague who left on vacation does this consistently; I realized I needed to do more of it with the team.
2. It takes skill to make the right trade-offs. Shared understanding is essential and operates at multiple levels. When we get to the level of a self-managed team, the articulation of objectives, value creation, and focus of work is critical. This goes far beyond checklists and transactional work – it’s the thinking and understanding to get to the right answer. The time and effort you spend to test tactics against strategies and make sure everything is connected gets you to business results every time. It also provides an approach for the team to test ideas and ensure connection to value or scope and move ahead.
3. Sometimes it takes another point of view to make you see something right in front of you. Trust is a foundational element of shared understanding. Teams that trust and are trusted listen to each other’s ideas, focus on the right thing rather than who is right, and come up with ways to get to the needed outcomes. When you’re worn out, in need of a break, or unavailable, it can be helpful to have someone else on the team step in. In the case of my lead’s vacation, one of the things that the team questioned was some of the weekly documentation we produced – the time it took and whether it was necessary. So, with 24 hours’ notice, they reinvented the level of detail, and we quickly received positive client feedback while maintaining the responsibility to document what was completed each week. On top of that, we netted more team time to spend on technology migrations.
4. It’s always a good time and never a good time to question the approach. Finesse is an important skill. We push ourselves and our clients to never take anything at face value. Many consultants, including us, call this the “five whys”: keep asking WHY until you get to the bottom line. In this case, the client had accepted our requirement that we work the complex technology migration on process intervals to increase quality and was also pushing to shorten those intervals without compromising quality. We had refused early on because we were still taking control of out-of-control methodologies. The client made a reasonable point with the new ask – things had changed over the past 45 days, and shouldn’t we review what some of the changes meant for an aggressive process? It was tempting to dig in for our planned approach, but why not take a look? Our joint team created an updated approach with a 30% interval reduction. Is it uncomfortable from an empirical data perspective? Yes. Is it a little edgy? Yes. Is it a reasonable risk? Yes, until proven otherwise, in this case.
5. Everyone isn’t going to be happy all the time, including clients, team members, bosses, and others. The key is being attentive to what is going on and why. Navigating the emotional side of teamwork is as critical as the content side. This one is trickier, especially since we had a demanding client and multiple team members that were focused on pleasing as well as doing the right thing. I respected what my team lead does all week even more when I realized how much the lead balances both quality and client happiness. When we swung a little too far to client happiness over quality (which can quickly become client unhappiness), our team needed help with the balance to make sure we didn’t undo months of hard work.
My colleague returned from vacation well rested and eager to catch up. We had a great conversation with the client about our progress over recent weeks. I’m grateful for our team and the client’s feedback on what we needed to examine. I’m very proud of our joint team for their ideas and commitment to excellence. And while I’m writing this for general consumption, next up I’m pledging to go check-in with all of them again on our common goal and tell them what a great job they are doing.
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I founded Blue Orbit Consulting in 2014 after running staff organizations in contact centers and building consulting practices in customer service, process improvement, complex program management, and channel operations. My approach – and my firm’s approach – is fundamentally pragmatic, and our clients often achieve benefits in excess of 10x their investment. We develop and deliver world-class customer interactions for our clients, whether it is troubleshooting and optimizing what they already have in place or creating strategic transformations to deliver outstanding customer interactions every time.