Empowering the Team

One of the first questions many people ask me revolves around which development methodology we follow at 2Catalyze. Although I would like to respond honestly with a simple statement and say that we are agile, I really do not want to do that because agile has become somewhat of a dirty word. Also, I do not want to specifically quote any of the agile implementation methodologies (like lean, scrum, xp) and say that we subscribe to it because that could lead to misinterpretation and it would not be correct. Really, I’d like to say that we concentrate on agile manifesto’s key values while not subscribing ourselves to a particular chic agile flavour. Since saying that might not be concrete enough so I’ll try to explain in this post how we approach development at 2Catalyze.

Our development team tries to reach out directly to our users when we need to make decisions or when they experience difficulties. We also always try to have someone from our dev team participate in Snowflake presentations and requirements gathering meetings. Our development and business team share the same premises and continuously share and discuss ideas. To help us understand our solution domain, some of our dev team members are Gen Y employees and we all read about Gen Y workplace issues and concern. We can relate to the problems our users face and we want to build a great service that will help all of us. We feel ownership of our software service solution and as owners feel confident that we can make right decisions without always seeking approval from others. At the same time, we’ve built a support network and coach each other in our individual areas of expertise.

I have recently re-read the Poppendiecks’ excellent book on Lean Software Development. This book is in fact a toolkit consisting of 22 tools that can help with implementing lean principles in a software development organization. Some of these tools need tweaking before they can be applied in a startup. In fact, such an approach is the essence of lean, and any other agile methodology for that matter. That is, to be successful one cannot simply look at other successful lean software companies and seek to replicate their model exactly. The core values focus on understanding that the development team should be intimate with the problem domain and should be in direct contact with the users to ensure the right value-adding solutions are developed. Empowering the team to gather user feedback and to make decisions on the go has proved to be a differentiating factor for many lean organizations across industries and continents.

Some of our approaches at 2Catalyze spruced up organically as a part of team discussions on how best to provide value to our users. Others were born after reflection exercises and trial and error periods. After re-reading Lean Software Development, we received confirmation that we are approaching solution creation in the right way. What do you think?