Team spirit and responsibility
Posted by Gerard Janssen terribly early in the morning: July 6, 2007
While working on projects or embedded with a customer you always work with other people. Having a good relationship with those around you is a must for being effective. If there is no trust, one cannot know whether the other party keeps his end of agreements made. Usually a natural sense of trust emerges when working with people. But what to think of those situations where you as a consultant are treated as an outsider who is not really part of the team and is considered way to expensive anyway?
In my opinion this is really bad, not to say really stupid. When working together, you are not just a random collection of people moving (or not) around in the same building. Instead, you ought to be a team, a focused team working together on reaching shared goals. Being a team, having a shared focus is the only way to really accomplish something. When people are actively promoting that consultants are not part of the team, they are in effect saying that they do not trust them and that they do not consider them to be working towards the same goals.
Obviously we as consultants have more goals than to make the assignment a success and to get the job done. We have our own careers and the future of Xebia that are also important to us. But that does not mean that while we on the job were are not giving our 100% to reach the clients objectives! On the contrary, I personally have worked in many companies where external people displayed a much bigger passion and drive for their work than the internal people who had being sitting there for many years. (those poor people, will they ever make it to retirement, or will their precious little jobs be reorganized away before that?)
Hiring externals is not a bad thing. There are many excellent reasons for getting in people from the outside. They (we) can bring expertise and experience that is not present in the organization. Consultants can fill up gaps and bring a fresh perspective, new knowledge etc. Having heterogeneous teams is a fact of life these days. Maybe in the early nineties it was still possible to have teams with only employees, nowadays the reality is that a lot op people like to work as a consultant and the labor market is so cramped up that you really need to bring in external staff to get the job done.
So how to deal with “us externals”? As I said before, having a team and sharing goals and visions is essential for effective cooperation. You need trust, confidence and respect. Being the lead architect of a company implies that you know who you teammates are, what they are capable of and most importantly that you can trust them. Real trust extends way beyond hoping that people hold their end of the bargain. It means relying on them, knowing that they will go beyond the agreed stuff that the will take responsibility for situations on which no agreements were made, but that do need action. That is who we are: we take action where we think it is needed for reaching our goals. So you better make sure that our goals are your goals. Make us part of the team!
Filed under: Agile, General, Project Management
July 7th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
Gerard,
Reading this post i get the idea that you wrote a plead to all (?, i come to that later*) to trust and respect external consultants. They bring experience and expertise, fill up gaps, give a fresh perspective on things and bring new knowledge.
May i state that your story and the feeling you expres in it, is a very personal one? I like to comment on your blog and will do this ‘point by point’.
1.You filed it under ‘java’. I am pretty sure that the experience, expertise, gaps perspectives and knowledge you write about in your view isn’t limited to ‘java’
2.There are different types of consultants: technical, management, financial, marketing etc and they are hired for what they professionally are going to bring and are paid for (what stated on their businesscards)
3.Consultant have different, sometimes political,** roles and they know (or ought to know) what role they have to play:
a.The legimator of change (pol) – working for the manager, doesn’t bring knowledge; just being there legitimises the change…..
b.The facilitator of change (pol) – takes an active role in an political situation (sometimes battle) between managers or other stakeholders
c.The expert in change (pol) – structuring and improving plans and ideas of the managers and making these plan of higher value
d.Skilled proffesionals (non-pol) – bringing knowledge and experience in specific areas
aa.Technical like testers, programmers, hardware, architects (digital and fysical)
bb.Management like interim managent, project management
cc.Etc.
4. Consultants should begin to identify the stakeholders in their environment. Analysing this helps them to know what is expected from them, what role they have to play (if that wasn’t already obvious), who is their opponent, who is the problem owner and who are their friends.
5. (Actually this is first) Not only in consultanty is it important to have trust and respect. This is very important in every relationship. To restrict this to the ‘surroundings’ you are writing about: When there is no trust between projectmembers (‘productowners’, users, developers, softwaresuppliers, projectmanagers, architects and so on) there will certainly be no trust towards consultants, wether they are external or internal. As for respect: it’s the same thing.
6. People who are actively promoting that consultants are not part of the team, who are sitting there for many years, who are proud of their precious little jobs, have no pashion and drive for the goals of the project are not reading your post because it doesn’t interests them anyhow. I don’t think this is restricted or applies only to lead architects* Do you have someone specifc in mind?
7. Consultants do have other experiences than what you have experienced (recently?). Your story is a very pessimistic one and is not helpfull for those who would like to be a consultant in the future (or are one now). Of course we have to confront ourselves with the brutal facts. I do think it is better to give (future) consultants perspective by not only telling them how life is in projects but show of tell them how they could act, what to look for and warn them for things they should never do. Share your knowledge and share examples of situations that did work well. And please tell them that they can gain friends for live.
I would be very pleased to have you and other consultants to my heterogenious team…wether internal or external…….when you can give us added value and earn the fee we pay.(:-)
Mary
**M.Alvesson, 1993, organizations as rhetorics: knowledge intensive firms and the struggle with ambiquity / R. Fincham, 1999. The client-consultant relationship: critical perspectives on the management of organizational change, etc, etc