PITA 062
How to encourage the formal creation of a customer-service team to improve things?
Communities of Practice - use another guise instead of a ‘team’ - to solve the issue
Soft rules / guidance / principles for how we consistently operationalise this. Expand from TEch support to more general support?
WHY is this important? What’s the success criteria for doing it well?
Creating a better experience - getting the documentation clear - had massive benefits. We simplified things, and our deployments went from 3 months to 2 weeks.
If we’re doing this extra thing, either we're not doing it well, or we’re not doing something else. What’s the actual priority?
Job / Consulting / Coaching Work market - wtaf!
Seemed to shift last year - much tighter than in my previous experience. Some sporadic things, and better if you have a UK Gov security clearance already.
US and German markets both in recession, US leadership says that their L&D budgets are gone.
People think AI will fix everything.
Big orgs have put a lot of money into AI, but no payback - where will the money go now?
VC - people are shutting things down, not investing
Phyl Terry - never search alone
Being on the hiring side - it’s a mess of BS of AI spam
It’s all about relationships. Work your network.
Worries about ageism - some of us (most of us?) are hitting the age where this feels like an issue
Have you seen the friction between disciplines getting worse during the downturn?
Given that ‘AI WILL SAVE US’, generalists should be valued. But instead everyone seems to want to hire niche specialists, and everyone is digging in and defending their territory
Uncertainty in the economy breeds protectionism & conflict
Airbnb had a bad influence - tho they didn’t fire all their Product Managers, people THOUGHT that they had
Founder mode - lots of places moving back towards command & control. People are not feeling like they can make decisions; they’re being pressured for short-term things and are misinterpreting it as the fault of other disciplines.
More remote - less time in person makes it harder to empathise and build teams/cultures across silos
BAs in a 'Pizza sized Agile team' - How?
Worked in one team - Product person was business/market focused, in an environment that was highly regulated and changeable. So BA was the SME in the legal/regulatory frameworks. Both would get involved in writing stories, tho.
I don’t like having a junior person - BA or PO - writing all the stories and PM being less involved in day-to-day. Make the junior person the PM, and have the Lead/Group PM an official contact/connection to the team
BA is a generic title - they can do lots of different things.
BAs are needed when there’s a high level of detail. On the ground with operational detail.