The view to Adjust Vs Adapt
The words “adjust” and “adapt” are misled in most of the situations. They are completely different terminologies conveying different meanings on the whole. In this article, I have explained the variances of these two terminologies and how they tie back to software development.
When we say adjusting to a situation, then we accept the right things as well as the flaws in the process. We don’t have to change anything that is going wrong over that particular process. Few areas are tweaked in the process so that the persona adjusts towards it. Adjustment is always a short term fix which will increase the wear out of the persona over time.
Any role in software projects should never allow adjustment in any form. Every role is unique in its roles and responsibilities. A business analyst/product owner owns what needs to be done (the scope of work) and the time to complete them, quality analyst ensures quality and the developer gives soul to the customer value through the development process. Though we say the team owns it all together, there is a discrete set of work assigned based on the roles.
When any role in a team begins to adjust their discrete goals based on other role-centric inputs, that’s going to storm the team. Again the analogy goes to adding too much salt or too less spoils a yummy dish. It’s on striking the balance based on a collective decision.
Here is an example: Let’s take a situation where the time to go live for a particular feature is one day away. The quality analyst finds a major issue. Since the date to go live is fixed that does not mean that the issue needs to be skipped without inspection. This means the team is adjusting to a situation.
Instead the team can come together to see if that can be fixed, or can the go live date be deferred or what’s the impact this issue causes towards the feature. The problem can be approached in multiple dimensions to come up with a solution. This is when we say the team is adaptable.
Adaptable means we understand the current environment by knowing the pros and cons in a process. Adaptable teams always will question “Why” something is happening the way it is. This leads to identifying the problems and craft solutions to turn the cons to pros. Adaptable teams are more productive as the team has proactive conversations and there is constant urge to question.
Being cautious on how our team feels is vital because any practice we follow in a team has an emotional connect on acting ethically and working productively with contentment. Do a self reflection of yourself in a team processing request, are you adjustable or adaptive?
Cheers!
