Trust and Open Communication

Today our team had a wonderful retrospective. The topic to be addressed was “Is retrospective useful or useless” [that is why I call this retrospective wonderful]

A little background: I have not been attending team retrospectives for quite a while and I had this concern on its effectiveness, based on what I hear during coffee break chats as well as through grapevines.

When the retrospective started, we started with question “Is it USEFULL or USELESS?”, the team members were little puzzled. They were not sure what needs to be said. Initially 2 members, responded that retrospective were very useful. This prompted me to give reassurance/reminder to team members that the purpose of retrospectives is to identify areas of improvements and as long as we do not open up the weak spots, we stay where we are. We need to do something different, lest we continue making same old mistakes. The outcome would be same as earlier sprints. This clicked and slowly team members started opening up. Below gives a summary on what did not work in earlier retrospectives.

1.       Team members were hesitant to talk freely

2.       Discussion concluded without actions (at least a majority felt so)

3.       Identified actions were not acted upon

4.       Even when actions were taken, these were not tracked to closure

5.       All stakeholders were not aware of what had happened to earlier actions

It was clearly evident that there was a total lack of TRUST among team members. Team members felt there was no use raising area of concerns, since there were not going to be any results. Yet another area that was lacking was adequate communication. When team members are not clear on specific actions taken, it clearly shows a complete lack of adequate communication.

Now, it is action time to bring back the lost trust as well as better means of communication. I will keep posting J

Accountability and ownership

I was on a workshop 2 weeks back with one of our customers, planning to launch agile in a big way and this interesting thought on accountability came in.

Being involved in agile way of working for the last 4-5 years, I am connected to many agile practitioners in the organization I work for. One of the Agile consultants suggested me to get involved in this workshop. Since I am passionate about agile, I was excited to get involved in this exercise.

The workshop was for 3 days and I would not be available for my team.  I am pretty confident that my team will manage during my absence. I also thought I could spare an additional 2-3 hours on my work in case required. This was the balancing game I planned when I committed my availability.

Agenda was Day 1, 2 to work and conclude on various practices, approaches to be considered, Day 3 was to come up with an integrated approach of overall way of working.

Day 1 went great with lots of discussions and contributions. Day 2, towards 3:00pm we were almost done and there was no specific role for me. However there was dinner planned that evening along with all participants. I was not very eager on the food part and thoughts about work back with my team was creating conflicts in my mind. So I decided to leave. I updated the team(workshop) and left for the day, went back to work and attended pending work.

Later that day, I could see something was disturbing me. (I have this habit of reflecting each day, how it went and I could realize something was not right). Pondering for some time I understood the actual cause. I should not have left the workshop without concluding for the day. Though I did update the team before I left, later I concluded, my decision to leave was not right. It was like not taking complete ownership and leaving the work half done. This thought created a big void and I felt quite disturbed. I realized my big mistake J

Accountability is about taking complete ownership and ensuring that activity picked is brought to conclusion in all respect. It is about DONE DONE.

Incompetency, Arrogance, Laziness only leads to customer dissatisfaction...

Last time I took my car for its periodic service and that was a nightmare for me when I look back... I literally lost 3-4 days of my sleep.

The story unfolds as below:

The service advisor (SA1) is surprised to hear me say the vehicle has no problems and I just need to do the regular maintenance along with the tyre rotation.

After the service, at end of day, I get back my vehicle, and make my payments.

Being curious, I ask SA1 “Where did the spare wheel go during rotation?” And now he explains, he has done a 4 wheel rotation. I was surprised by this remark. I humbly ask him what he means by 4 wheel rotation for which he explains in detail. (He removed wheels in front and put it behind – I do not understand what is meant by rotation). I did not agree and ask him to do a 5 wheel rotation, which he agrees though disheartened. Since it was too late, and neither there were people with right skills to do the job, I agree to bring my vehicle the next day.

During my second visit, SA1 manages to perform the requested task and I get my vehicle after 2 hours. He confirms that balancing and alignment has been done. I drove to office and then parks back at home.

The next day I realize, there is something wrong with the vehicle. Something unusual about the way, the vehicle was moving. I check the vehicle and realize that the alignment work was done incorrectly and now the vehicle steering was misaligned (due to incorrect alignment). I call up SA1 to update this and asks him what he wanted to do further. He does not agree initially that there is a problem with vehicle. When I put across my dissatisfaction, and explain him the details, he finally he agrees. He suggests me to bring my car for check-up the third time.

During the third visit, the front office executive (FOE) indicates that they cannot take my car for servicing since I do not have a prior appointment. I flared at the FOE for her arrogance (from my point, I gave a vehicle in good condition for regular maintenance service and now I am visiting third time come out of the after-service impact). She later updates me that SA1 was on leave for the day. I get a new person (SA2) to check the car. He promptly accompanies me for a test drive and observes the problem reported. I explain him the details and even tries to explain him why the problem would have come. (Obviously because the alignment required for the 5^th wheel during rotation was not done. )

After test drive, he calls in his folks and removes the steering wheel (attacking the wrong route cause) and tries to adjust the handle. I was totally shocked by this and goes back to explain them what they are supposed to do. By then, they had messed up the steering wheel. They take it to wheel alignment bay, does something and returns the vehicle to me. SA2 accompanies me for another test drive where I complain him about the vehicle going towards the right side of the road, when the steering wheel was left free. He even recommended me to just change the orientation. The steering also becomes stiff, which required additional effort (rotating in opposite direction) to bring back to default position once I had done a complete rotation of steering (when I turned any side). I realize, it was useless spending my time here and tells him good bye.

I could feel the difference after the third visit. I was a little disturbed since I did not know how to proceed, since each additional visit only added to my problems instead of solving them. I also realized that the right side of the wheel was getting worn out when I just drove about 100KM. This pricked me hard. Apparently, I was looking at the best option to resolve the problem in hand. I literally lost 3-4 days of sleep (I do mean that and my better half was furious about this – she claims, if I give a portion of attention/ care that I am giving for this car (to her), she would have been a lot happier J)

After each vehicle service, I usually get a call to check back on how the service experience was. When I got this call, I expressed my complete furiousness and dissatisfaction. The executive promptly apologizes and promise me that required action will be taken. I get a callback from the service center the next day, indicating that they have received this complaint from me and wanted to address it, for which I clearly indicated; if it is the same advisor I would rather not come back (I had enough with 3 visits). They further apologize and disconnect call confirming to update on further action. However, I do not hear from them back. I was clearly surprised with this inaction.

Infuriated, disgraced, I finally call back the main office mentioning that I have a complaint which needs to be addressed. I get an appointment the next day.

During my fourth visit, I meet a new service advisor (SA3). I explain the complete history from beginning to end. He seemed to understand, and I also double confirmed that he did understand the problem before he took the car for further repair work. After about two hours, I get the car for test drive. This time I felt most of the problems were resolved except for the fact that there was a small tilt in the handle (impact due to the initial action done when the steering was removed to refit)

After the long story, let me try to explain, what I wanted to actually discuss in this forum:

The above example has all cases of laziness, incompetency, arrogance and what not. And all these has only added to customer dissatisfaction (me J)

Summary:

SA1 was careless, lazy. He could have done a decent job the very first time. He made me visit 3 times to service center.

FOE was arrogant. Especially, when a customer is totally furious, this is the last thing any customer would expect from the service provider.

SA2 was purely incompetent and lacked listening skills. He did not understand the root cause and tried to attack only the symptom. (Unfortunately we all do this many a times). He did not listen when the complete history was explained to him. He just wanted to get rid of the customer.

However, SA3 had the right blend of listening skills as well as technical knowhow to understand the customer’s problem. He listened, understood and attacked the root cause of the problem rather than the visible symptoms.

I wanted to update that SA3 called up after 2 days to check back with me on the vehicle condition. This did excite me. With SA3, I saw a totally dissatisfied customer, turning around. All these has provided me good lessons, which I can use while I am on the other side of serving...