Mindset Matters

Each one of us has experienced many projects successes in our professional career. We have also come across situations where project goes through a tough time. We all would agree that the most common scenario is when the Customer complains The Project team gets into a syndrome; I will name this as “It’s Customer Fault Syndrome”. It finds a cause which is external to it; may be it has to do with some action or elements at customer’s end. Whenever a problem occurs, some causes are found which points to the pre-identified cause. Sometimes the cause may be valid. I would argue it gives the team, tremendous power if they get out of “It’s Customer Fault Syndrome” and start looking inside out.

Let us take a case for discussion. Due to privacy issue, the data available to us was always dated. Sometimes we came across a situation where the testing was constrained due to dated data. The defect was difficult to produce. Our team did not look at the alternative ways and took an easy path. Think; if the team members would have looked for an alternate way then I am sure they could have found some alternate (BEST) solution. Instead the team preferred to continuously stay in “It’s Customer Fault Syndrome”. This wasn’t helpful.

There was another situation where the team had developed the software under discussion from ‘scratch’. The software was under maintenance mode. Whenever the customer found many defects, the team came up together to identify the defects. The team would classify the defects as Existing defect, Change Request, etc. The team went an extra mile by identifying the change requests but the Change requests were never agreed by the customer in a joint meeting. This way of classification gave the team a pseudo-satisfaction of not committing too many defects. This continued to go on for a while. You can imagine the amount of noise being generated; we were on the verge of losing the work. Management realized that they were under “It’s Customer Fault Syndrome”. Finally they decided to come out of it. Initially a lot of explanation was required. There was also resistance in the team. But the decision was to be taken. Both the causes mentioned above were got rid off. The goal was to own all the defects. The team discussed them and very soon, we came across a situation where improvement was visible.

This is not a rocket science. But unfortunately many times we become a victim of this syndrome. I suggest that whenever you see many fingers shown towards customer, look at it. Let us not forget customer pays our pay check. Start looking inside-out. Try changing the situation democratically. If it takes time; think of other options. Your success depends on coming out of “It’s Customer Fault Syndrome”. You will get good solutions. You will succeed.

Success- is all about Mindset. It’s the Mindset which matters.