How does it feel to stay with the client after IT project’s failure?
Projects in IT fail. Reasons for this can be different, sometimes predictable sometimes not. Being an IT manager for 10 years means you probably have experienced examples of this kind of situation. More specifically, I will talk about cases when a team is working inside client company culture and in client ecosystem, opposite would be detached teams working on some project with little to none contact with client culture. Inside client company culture we have 2 situations. One when the development team is in the client office and the second one when the team is remote.
Client office
Working in a client office is especially interesting since the client’s company culture and your home company culture usually differ a lot. In this case team notices those differences. It goes from the workplace but ends up on salaries, developer’s attitude toward client and toward code quality itself. Manager must prepare his team for these situations! Also you have to keep in mind your company culture is being presented to clients.
Story I would like to share is about a little team of 3,4 developers on mobile technologies working somewhere in the EU. Inside the client office with about 20,30 developers, the team worked on a new social network start-up project. Home developers were very good payed, cars were fancy, food was classy, code was shitty. Our team worked 8h a day, usual code standards, just ordinary day at work. Start-up lost investors, all teams lost it’s jobs, except ‘our’ team. Owner of the start-up was amazed by the persistence, stability and code standards of our team. This team has stayed and continued development on another project with a client. This situation shaped the future company culture of this team and host company! Lucky fact was that one of the developers was the CEO of this company. He understood what happened, cos in larger companies’, nice stories like this can pass not noticed. Nice example of how a start-up project fail can shape things in a positive way.
I met the above mentioned CEO and he shared this really nice story with me. He even researched the topic and found out few other stories like his one. My mind was blown, how lucky you must be to live and tell a story like this?
Remote team
Working in a remote team has it’s flow and benefits. Big G science studies on developer teams behaviour said all there is to be said on that topic. Manager needs to make that extra effort to really get to know his developers and try to lead by example as much as possible. When you work remotely with clients and developers over years, you learn that personal contact, reaching people on personal level makes most impact to overall team performance. Let us also be aware that all this same way impacts client developers, so benefits are mutual.
The second story, this one is my own, happens in a USA Enterprise size company with more than 1000 people in the Engineering communication channel. Wow! This is a hard one, are you sending chats and posting to 1000 people often?
Our team in this case was also a small one, 3 developers and BA working as a remote team. Team worked in different time zones, inside client ecosystem and client culture. Remotely. Team communicated with developers of different nationalities, backgrounds, skills, developers from all time zones. Project the team worked on was finished, pushed to production and closed by the client. No explanation. But our team has stayed with clients and continued development on new projects.
Next year our Enterprise size company started SAFE agile transformation and layoffs started in regular intervals. Company has flattened its management structure in the department our team was working in. Finally, our client side project manager (assigned to the team from our Enterprise size company) got fired also. Can you guess what happened? Team has continued collaboration and is still doing development in the USA Enterprise size company.
Conclusion
People who finance IT projects generally do care about their money. They do see good developers and good teams, and if possible, they do try to continue collaboration with good teams. My dear investors, working with remote teams is cheaper than in-house development teams AND even Enterprise size companies are using them regularly. Guess why!
WWorking inside code standards and promoting them? Finishing projects in time? Being persistent and transparent in communication? Keeping developer’s ethics as standard? These few things together always pay off in the end! Look closely, there are a lot of stories like this in the IT world. Heads up and keep on rocking, my dear developers!
Kristijan Pušić, Engineering Manager, Setronica team
