Handover: "us" and "they"

In October, I got this question: “Can you help us to make our hand over process work?"

Interesting question!



Many agile-religious-people will automatically answer that there should not have been a hand over process in the first place. I think there is no such thing as "should not" in IT or in organisations in general. There are many very valid reasons why things evolve into what they are, and most organisations do have some form of hand-over at some level.  The challenge is therefore; what to do within this scope?

Interesting topic!!

This organisation have looked at what is the root cause of this situation in the first place:

• Optimisation for silos; this have ensured high quality of technical expertise, but also not optimising for the whole value chain
• The needs of the customers have been primary focus (very important!) now the focus needs to be on the longer term and market transitions as well (also important!)

 

Then the organisation looked at next steps:

• Acknowledgement of situation
• Management decision making for long term solution (including some reprioritisation)
• Communicate the target picture
• Involvement
• Firefighting: Add people with great people skills that can fix things between departments and make people talk to each other, and just make things happen
• Start working on the long term solution

Being part of this now, make me reflect on the whole "us" and "they" as a topic. And I do not think there is one single organisation completely without this challenge in one form or another. The big question is; how to deal with it?

I remember back in 2003, when I was fresh out of university with my masters degree, and got my first job. The company I worked for had recently re-organised from service-centric units to be divided into three departments: development, maintenance and operations.

We believed documentation to be the main API between the development and the maintenance parts of the organisation. To make software from development/projects work in production, the maintenance department only needed to list specific requirements to them –and perform audits.

This created an optimised environment for both projects and maintenance, however we also got some frustration based on the "us" and "them" feeling:

Frustration in the projects: somebody from the outside (the maintenance department) came in and disrupted the flow they were in. Lots of the requirements were way out of scope (not part of the contract) and presented in a not so collaborative manner

Frustration in the maintenance department: why did not the projects take into account how the systems were to work in the real life (real servers, real security, real logging, real installation files that actually work at night in the short and few hours of downtime the SLA could allow)

However, we also had some great people on board, that helped us remember that we were in the same boat:

I worked with a great project manager who repeated her mantra; “We have a shared goal here, for our customers and for our company. How can we make this work together?” This is a great take-away, and I have brought it with me and thought of it every day since. This learned us to see that we were part of the same problem and the same solution.

How to change the “us” and “they” mentality is only possible by working together. Working in different departments might work only if:

• the managers are well aligned and share the same goals.
• people from all departments are included in the project work during on a regular basis, at least weekly
• people from all departments are informed, before it is strictly necessary, and kept in the information loop.
• I do not think it is possible to over-share! invite to reviews, send out summary e-mails, drop by for coffee, have lunch together
• people from all departments are invited to parties, kick off and other events 
• do not underestimate the importance of team t-shirts :)

 

 

A great exercise is to think this through on a regular basis:

• Where in my organisation do we have "us" and "them" challenge?
• What can I do to improve the "we-are-in-the-same-boat"-spirit?