Talent + Processes = Deadly Combo
Last coupla months have been hectic and exciting!
I never expected any of my buddies to notice this blog; somehow some of the closest ones seem to have visited. Have received encouraging feedback and decided to continue on this series after a gap of 3-4 months now!
So many things happening around; will be writing abt specific experiences later. For now, just a summary of small conversation I had with a team-mate:
Ever since I understood what're "processes" in a software products company, have been a religious follower of processes. I guess this is the reason, out of my 7 years of working, most of the time, I've been tasked with enforcing processes in my teams.
I was trying to get across this point to this guy in my team. He is a promising CS graduate from an NIT (erstwhile REC, one of the top technical institutes in India), we'd hired 3-4 months back. He's started everything afresh after coming here and had started actively contributing in last 1 month. Him being a fresher, some peculiar issues were found with him too; and I've been taking efforts to bring him up to a level. I sensed that many a times, when I asked him to follow a particular process to do certain things, he was not completely agreeing with me and had different thought process going on at the back of his mind. On specific occasaions he tried to implement quick solutions for some problems raised by QA, bypassing the dictated process. And almost each of these cases, it turned out that the time taken to resolve the issues was a lot more. He used to get furious at QA team members for raising bugs for supposedly trivial matters.
It had to be explained to him, that having talent is one thing; following processes is another. Any one alone cannot gurantee good results. In the past I've seen results delivered by individuals sheerly based on their talent and heroics, without following processes. But I think, its not a scalable model to build upon. It can work only till the team size is small (5-10) and all of it is at one place. The moment you have bigger teams split between more than one places, it'll fail. In the absense of processes, even if you have tremendous talent in the team, you cannot gurantee good and timely results.
In todays market, there no dirth of individuals with either talent or understanding of processes; but there're very few with both skills. And I feel such people are of tremendous value to the organization they belong to.
In this regard, had to share my opinion abt guys who contribute to the open source community; but gotta finish this now. Keep watchin this space for more ...
I never expected any of my buddies to notice this blog; somehow some of the closest ones seem to have visited. Have received encouraging feedback and decided to continue on this series after a gap of 3-4 months now!
So many things happening around; will be writing abt specific experiences later. For now, just a summary of small conversation I had with a team-mate:
Ever since I understood what're "processes" in a software products company, have been a religious follower of processes. I guess this is the reason, out of my 7 years of working, most of the time, I've been tasked with enforcing processes in my teams.
I was trying to get across this point to this guy in my team. He is a promising CS graduate from an NIT (erstwhile REC, one of the top technical institutes in India), we'd hired 3-4 months back. He's started everything afresh after coming here and had started actively contributing in last 1 month. Him being a fresher, some peculiar issues were found with him too; and I've been taking efforts to bring him up to a level. I sensed that many a times, when I asked him to follow a particular process to do certain things, he was not completely agreeing with me and had different thought process going on at the back of his mind. On specific occasaions he tried to implement quick solutions for some problems raised by QA, bypassing the dictated process. And almost each of these cases, it turned out that the time taken to resolve the issues was a lot more. He used to get furious at QA team members for raising bugs for supposedly trivial matters.
It had to be explained to him, that having talent is one thing; following processes is another. Any one alone cannot gurantee good results. In the past I've seen results delivered by individuals sheerly based on their talent and heroics, without following processes. But I think, its not a scalable model to build upon. It can work only till the team size is small (5-10) and all of it is at one place. The moment you have bigger teams split between more than one places, it'll fail. In the absense of processes, even if you have tremendous talent in the team, you cannot gurantee good and timely results.
In todays market, there no dirth of individuals with either talent or understanding of processes; but there're very few with both skills. And I feel such people are of tremendous value to the organization they belong to.
In this regard, had to share my opinion abt guys who contribute to the open source community; but gotta finish this now. Keep watchin this space for more ...
posted by Amol at 7:41 AM
3 Comments:
Happen to stumble upon your blog.Good, ain't it....Whoever you are, you seem rich with knowledge and thoughts..I agree with all of your blogs,where you say superficial knowledge is not good.. but so many technologies changing.. with so many projects changing.. I haven't got a chance to work on one piece for long.. so I never had the time to go to depth of subject and have covered lot of breadth. How do you ensure both?
Nice blog creation
Sir, visit my blog. www.rohinipawar.blogspot.in
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