The joy of the journey

The software industry in India has really taken a toll on the IT employees. There have been plenty who are talking about exhaustion, retirement and moving out of the industry after 15+ years of hard experience. These are some of the stalwarts, greats who have done well for the IT service industry. The key reason has been that they have put in long midnight hours to bring a new project, work on bring the the projects into control and just executing this cycle with different pace, complexity and size but the cycle has been the same. When you take a step back at these instances, it is very evident that the industry will very soon take the exhaustion path unless we device a mechanism to bring in the joy of the IT journey at everything we do in IT. I have found less and less people who enjoy what they do, and always have a reason why they do not like what they do. The key is 'What is the joy factor of the Indian IT industry?'. Improving this is hard both individually and collectively!

Agile to me is one of the mechanism that can bring this change. Take your team to take a step back and have them turn the tables around. Focus on current working software rather than contract and to-be BRDs and working on the accuracy and quality of those. Focus on the journey rather than the destination. Bring the customer to your world and have him/her understand your problems and appreciate his problems on a day-to-day basis. The key is 'day-to-day basis'. This is as simple as the age old mechanism 'early and correct feedback provide better performance and better performance will improve satisfaction which in turn improves enjoyment.

I have seen the agile model breaking the shackles of the Contracts, Roles, Commitments and brings self-organizing teams to address the need of the hour to ensure you are always taking baby steps in the right direction and validating the baby step after every of them with the right and earnest owner. Obviously the customer does more than he needs to, but he gets more than he can expect as the teams deliver with passion and enjoyment, rather than control and fear. This to me is one of the significant and game changing deliverable that this cultural change can bring into the table. Time can only convince both of us, but I put my bet on this just because this brings unity amongst teams, more team work, more team enjoyment and overall commitment to deliver across the vendor, service provider, customer and the final end user and hence the joy of the journey rather than the destination itself.

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