Self Directed Team | Caerus Skillmatic | Harison Xavier

    Once I had a great opportunity to make a presentation on "Self Directed Team and Organizational Development" to my teacher and a great mentor Girinarayan G, one of his favorite subjects is organisation development. I always see that energy and the passion he has while talking about organization development (OD). I gained invaluable insights on how important is human resources (HR) in any company.  There is a general ignorance towards the HR department as they are non production departments in the company, yet these are the very same people who hire the talent needed for a company.  

During our sessions on OD, self directed teams was one such topic, I was chosen to make a presentation, after learning about self directed teams, I remembered back in the initial days at Caerus Skillmatic when I experienced this without knowing about its benefits.

    This is a story of how our small department in Caerus Skillmatic got introduced to be a self directed team.This happened when our CEO and COO brought in a new project to the company that we have never done before. Our company was predominantly into E-Learning, our new project was to create an online learning platform for a large automotive company. As a content marketer I was given a role of a business analyst for this project. At the very moment I was informed that I will be a part of this project too, I knew that I was moving towards a steep learning curve in the technology industry. A sense of confusion came to mind -  what, How, Where? I will need the help of my fellow team members.

     I noticed something, the communication between our team and our upper management became less and less as we moved forward with the project.  I was fortunate to have Deepshika as our project manager , Tanmay and Raviveedra as my software engineers. The project started within a few days after the final confirmation from our management. All the project plans were done by Deepshika, she had an excellent strategy plan to finish the project on time.  The first task was to design a wireframe (wireframe - blueprint of how a website will look like once website building is complete) for the online platform. As I got the experience in designing and developing online contents for websites before this job was given to me. 

        Now the question that I had in the back of my head all these days came to the picture. Why is it that we don’t have any upper management in our team. Shouldn’t they be deciding these matters too? Is it them who should make the final decision? 

At first  after a brief confusion and doubts wireframe building became easy. Thank you to my tech team without their help I would have struggled much. They have shown a great amount of patience teaching me the software side of technology and  little did I know this was the easiest part. 

My next job was to get the approval of our client and convince my tech team to  build the website.  To my surprise the design was approved after a few meetings and clarifications after that my team started building the website from scratch. 

        Yet again the same question. Where is our upper management? Coming from a traditional corporate culture, I am not used to taking decisions without running by my supervisors. One day I enquired about this and the response I got was something new, as we follow agile methodology, in order to avoid delay in project completion and better time management, the leaders are standing out of the way and trusting the team to perform the roles perfectly. They will only intervene when it is absolutely necessary. 

        I was astonished by the importance of this methodology and its working principle, from a traditional Systems development life cycle (SDLC) a more modern approach Agile Method.  This was a new learning for me as I just got introduced to the core software industry and its working environment.

As the manifesto goes: 

We are uncovering better ways of developing

software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

        We faced a lot of challenges to function without a boss but we did it successfully, our final result was a success. To make it clear here agile is also a self directed team methodology, the only difference here is agile is IT industry specific and self directed team build is for all corporate companies. (Agile could also be used in other industries too).

I would consider working in an agile environment as one of the best learning opportunities in life.