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It was that Friday I was wondering what shall I do from next Monday. Every business owner including the colleagues who handed over the topic to us previous weeks will be on vacation due to Christmas. Until Jan 2nd, I don’t think there will be anyone who can answer my questions for any (or every) items listed in requirement list for MD4 (milestone delivery 4th month for 2014) of Deployment Cockpit (DC).
As soon as I was back from Walldorf, I was trying to consolidate findings and learnings. Whenever I felt certain technical things which will be undoubtedly necessary while working in the next quarter, I use to just inform about those topics to one of my colleague who was scholar at SAP and became permanent employee in my team very recently. He made sure that he will do necessary research and understands at least basics of those technical items if it is new for all of us. Now he has become the technical correspondent of our team :wink: .
Another colleague of mine was called as Junior Design thinking (JDT) coach. Other than working as developer in DC, another big responsibility of her is to guide different sub-team to move in the direction of Design thinking. Without having a coach, working model slowly lean back to the traditional approach as I noticed in my earlier projects. Her presence in the project turned out to be the positive factor for our team and we executed things keeping design thinking as far as possible in our mind.
In the name of design thinking with the support of JDT coach, I thought let me dive deep into each of those topics listed as requirements, let me try to understand each of those items assuming myself as project manager. ‘Have empathy towards your customer’ from Hasso was the text that I use to read every day while coming out of coffee corner. May be this quote forced me to think by stepping into the shoe of project manager. But instead of doing alone, why not with all developers was my question (as they will be free anyway from 23rd of December :smile: ).
There was a calendar blocker popping-up in computer screen for all of my colleagues in the team on Monday morning, who took handover of DC. We gathered in the meeting room and I opened up the excel file. I started with the agenda and made them clear that this meeting is to think ourselves as project manager and try to understand that list having only one line requirements.
During the course of meeting, my hunger made me to turn towards wall clock. It was already time for lunch. Unfortunately, it was very surprising that we were still discussing the very first line in that list. We decided to pause at that time and I heard JDT coach expressing the satisfaction in the quality of discussion we had though it was just one topic for half day.
When we were back from lunch, we decided that instead of defining stipulated time for each topic, why shouldn’t we keep discussing by looking at only our biological clock. This decision made us to sit in the same meeting room every day for that one complete week (nevertheless the meeting request was sent only for that Monday morning).
This one week was spent in such a way that everybody is suggesting everything that comes to their mind and meanwhile all of them were highlighting the possible disadvantages of each suggestion in a healthy way. To the business owners when they were back from vacation, we proposed those things that we could able conclude as good! And interestingly we received green signal for almost every proposal.
Then team started building the functionality that was suggested by themselves and much appreciated by business owners. This turned out to be the motivating factor for every individual.
On one fine night during the development cycle, I found my mobile phone blinking before I was going for bed. There were some messages in WhatsApp. It was a group called ‘DC’!, and I am newly added member to this group. Most of my teammates started discussing the things related to this project. This was something made me surprised. It has become a mini forum already.
Because of this mini forum which turned out be very handy, the questions were shot irrespective where they are, what they are doing and as soon as it strikes to their mind without waiting. It made sure that nobody will forget any question which is related to DC and once answered, everybody will be in the same page.
In Pic : Nanditha Shivaram, Sheffali Dhamija, Nitesh Mishra
At last with this working model there were no re-work in code implementation and we had a successful go-live last week. :smile:
Tomorrow is another big day for us after go-live. We could able to find the time of real end-users of this tool and organized a knowledge share session with them. I crossed my fingers and waiting to know how well they will receive this tool. :???:
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