IT/Business - how to talk the same language?

In an amazing post  guys from NeverWorkAlone discuss a very sensitive  productive-breaking and team destroying problem of making IT and business teams talking the same language. The blog is full of bright ideas and practical advice on how to resolve the problem (or at least to mitigate confrontation) and besides my wish to draw your attention to the blog I want to add my two cents.

In a customer-centric startup the problem can be solved relatively easy by engaging all employee with customer iteractions. If the company produces sotfware for consumers it probably has a helpdesk or another form of customer support operations. Letting all the employees  (first off, the most remoted from the customers part of the company - R&D team) help the cusotmers and  answer the questions directly may bridge the gap between technology- and business-oriented views in the team.

Talking to the customers directly may excite the techies by feeling importance of the job the do and enclose the logical chain in understanding of the company target. Feeling importance of contributing to success of the company is a very powerful factor in motivating. On the other hand acquainting with the customer problems through a bug report system obscures the pain of the client and lessens importance of developers contribution. I'm not advocating for closing the support group and putting the burden on R&D. My point is all R&D should be permanently involved with with direct customer interactions and answering customer questions is one the simple ways.

If the company plays on the enterprise market then instead of working in the support team developers can participate in a product definitionn team's meetings. Delegating a developer for such meetings from R&D to represent a technical point of view and later transfer features' business prospectives back to R&D may also make the developers feel their relevancy and the influence they have on the process. Ultimatelly if the  company has custom project implementations assigning a development angel from the R&D team (besides regular stuff) can be great motivating stimulus and desired encouregement. Other options can be engaging the engineers with pre-sale workshops or other cusomer-targeted round-tables. The idea is the same - exposing the technical guys to the business concerns.

To bridge the misunderstanding gap from the business side I'd suggest also to delegate business guys to technical meetings. To let them join technical brainstorming meetings and to request the thechies there to explain in simple words the problems they're attacking.

So my point is the spirit of the company should be orbiting around one big target - drive the product to its success via customer statisfaction. So the company should consist of, and more important perceive itself  as a team, of professionals joined to achieve this target despite and thank to the fact of the differences in their expertise.

Technorati tags: Customer, Leadership, team, R&D

Comments

[Dwayne Melancon]

Those are excellent insights, Roman - especially getting the business guys to go to the technical meetings. The "walk a mile in my shoes" approach works with customers, as well as internal stakeholders.

And enjoy your time in Portland - the weather is fantastic right now. At least it is today - but it can change pretty quickly!