From Dov Seidman on ‘Outperforming by Outbehaving’
But in our commoditized world, we are running out of areas of differentiation. In trying to find them, we look for the sources of great variation. There is one area where tremendous variation and variability still exists-one that we have not yet analyzed, quantified and systematized and one, in fact, that cannot be commoditized or copied — the realm of human behavior.
I feel that this is very relevant to the work that we do in conceptualizing and engineering a software product. It is about the people associated, the human values shared and the trust amongst the team and with customers in addition to the technology and processes. All agile teams say - We follow an iterative approach to delivery – so what? There are a lot of groups who do so. Well, we have a very well defined set of processes to be followed. So what? Processes are defined in every organization. We have a real time progress dashboard accessible to our customers. So? Everybody has that. What’s the difference?
A team can differentiate by the people and the behaviours that they practice. It is the environment of openness and trust and how the behaviours and practices are inculcated . Teams need to understand that they are successful if customers are successful. Teams need to lay great emphasis on understanding the stakeholders and ensuring that the stakeholder priorities are well understood and this is percolated down to all members of the team. It is the day to day interactions which really matter – it makes team members feel valued, it makes teams listen to the ‘voice of the customer’ and all of these lead to stakeholder satisfaction and great products.
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