Could this help you?

Working… just about

Earlier this month, I wrote about things people say in tech teams that sound “normal”. I’ve been in and witnessed countless teams where these kinds of challenges are normalised so much that the team dynamic is considered to be “working”. Or just about.

• Your team is shipping code… slowly.
• Your product released on time… with lots of bugs.
• Your team is coming to work every day… but they’re stressed.
• Your team are lovely and friendly… but they don’t really trust each other to do a good job.
• Your engineers are great when they know what to do… but they won’t ask for help when they don’t.
• You made a decision six months ago… but no one can remember why.
• You’re keeping all the fires under control… but have no time for strategy.
• You have a lot of critical meetings… but few of them feel like they have satisfying outcomes.

Such teams might think “this isn’t perfect, but it’s what we’ve got to work with and what could a consultant really change?”

The hidden costs of “normal” teams

Sometimes it can be hard to see the actual costs of teams operating at this “normal… just” level. You’ve planned out your budget for the year and most of it is salaries. You’ve got a little buffer for emergencies, so everything is working within expected parameters.

But time is money: each member of your team only has a finite number of hours they can be working in the service of your goals. Everything that slows them down costs your team money, because you’re spending that salary regardless of how quickly you meet your goals.

• If a team member is tired, stressed or upset, they will think at a fraction of their peak performance. Thinking more slowly means meeting goals more slowly.
• If a team member is looking for work elsewhere, eventually you will need huge amounts of management time hiring and training their replacement.
• If you spend the days after each release mopping up bugs, your best engineers and leaders will not be working towards strategic goals in that time.
• If you keep having to have meetings about things that were already decided or cannot reach consensus, every one of those meetings is costing your organisation money.
• If you are not making space for strategic discussions, you might be at risk of being blindsided by a major change to your market that’s on the horizon, or a big version upgrade of one of your dependencies, or a data leak or cyber attack.

These might not be the specific issues your team is facing, but you can probably think of many other examples where you could be incurring costs that are avoidable.

Where these teams are

I’ve seen these teams everywhere - anywhere people are building long-lived digital products that serve multiple users. But I think there are a couple of places where this kind of team is especially prevalent, and the fixes to these challenges are less evident to the in-house problem solvers:

No one-size-fits-all solution

When you hire a “consultant”, very often they’ll come in with their “tried and tested solution”: a carefully packaged product that effectively forces their way of doing things onto your team. I’ve seen this happen, and it rarely results in something that sticks after the consultant gets paid and leaves.

Fish Percolator’s approach is to treat all problems as human-centred. You can’t solve a problem by pretending you know the solution before you’ve even arrived. It requires getting to know the individuals on the team. Their motivations. Their needs. Their desires. And their strengths. Getting to know the individual line management relationships and the team’s relationships to existing policies and processes.

Then, it’s about empowering the existing leadership of the team with new tools and perspectives, so that they have more options for tackling future challenges, long after the consultant has left. Sometimes these tools will come from existing methodologies (for example, I’m a big fan of Behaviour-Driven Development, Thinking Environment and Nonviolent Communication) but sometimes they’ll be bespoke for your team. No two teams are going to need the exact same work to get past their challenges.

Is it affordable?

Honestly, capitalism is a joke sometimes. Consultancy isn’t cheap and running this business isn’t easy.

But here’s why I think your team can afford this:

1. The process includes coming in for a few days’ discovery first. After those findings have been presented, you may decide it’s not worth the future investment in the full “embed” stage. You may even have enough new knowledge about your team that you can now solve these challenges without us. That’s still incredibly great and valuable work for us.
2. It’s cheaper than hiring a full-time manager, and the risks are lower. Honestly, you can fire us pretty much any time if we’re not having the impact you expect.
3. Those costs I mention above. They add up, don’t they? How many hundreds of pounds have you lost to inefficiently chaired meetings in the last week alone?

Let’s talk anyway?

Even if you’re not ready to commit, please consider getting in touch or booking a free 30-minute call. Even that first call might unblock something for you, and you won’t have had to pay a penny.

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