Blog Reflection 4 – Collaboration: The Best of Times | The Worst of Times

I’ve had the great fortune of working on several projects over the course of my life, some professional, others academic, and still others personal. What follows is an examination of two different professional collaborative experiences that I labeled as either “best” or “worst” for the sake of this assignment. Digging up memories and writing down the answers to the assignment prompts helped bring me to the realization that both experiences have formed and shaped me in ways that I wouldn’t trade. I worked in the learning and development department for one of my employers for the better part of 20 years, and one of the aphorisms I picked up early on in my career there was, “Experience is the best teacher.” Through the best and worst of times, I find this to be consistently true.

Please select your best team (or collaboration) experience and worst experience.

Best Experience: Software Platform Replacement Project

Worst Experience: South Africa Business Process Migration Project

Please provide a brief description of the assignment or project or event ...etc.

My best collaboration experience was on a company-wide project to replace our 15 years old software platform with a new platform built on up-to-date technology. We needed to make the change because the old platform offered little to no agility or flexibility to suit current and prospective customer needs. Our executive leadership and board of directors recognized that this old technology was stifling our ability to grow and meet the changing demands of the marketplace.

My worst collaboration experience happened with the same company as my best experience. Some years after the software platform replacement experience, I was assigned to be on a project that impacted company offices in 16 different countries. The objective was for each office to move all their contact center and back-office processing operations from being in-house to a centralized global operations supercenter based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Why these projects?

The project to replace our outdated software platform was something I wanted to be a part of for a long time. I worked on the old system for my entire career up to project launch and intimately knew the pain points that I, my teammates, and our customers had struggled through over the years. When the company announced that we were getting a replacement system, I was very excited. I immediately expressed interest in being as involved as possible in as many aspects of the project as I could. I was fortunate to be at a place in my career where I’d reached a high level of expertise in multiple facets of the business and also knew how different areas affected one another. I was excited to bring to fruition a set of solutions to some long-standing problems and help make people's jobs easier and more efficient.

South Africa was an unwelcome surprise to me and many others in the company. It was an effort to downsize our home office and remove the parts of the business that my department supported. It most certainly meant layoffs. My team and I were asked to fly across the world and train our replacements, with no assurances that we would have a job left when we came back home. The project initiatives were clear: 1) help the South African office get up and running at peak performance so that the business in the US could close redundant business units, 2) be positive while doing it. Failure was not an option.

What made you feel the experiences were great or bad?

The software platform replacement project was great for several reasons:

·       I learned how to write professional business requirements documents

·       I learned how to clarify requirements to software development teams

·       I learned about project management techniques and formal project cadences

·       I learned how to create test scripts and coordinate user acceptance testing

·       I learned how to use vital tools in the software development industry like Jira

·       I learned how to QA (quality assurance) test software and report defects and bugs

·       I learned how to prioritize features based on business value and deal with my own frustrations when business value and my most personally coveted features didn’t align

·       I learned how to communicate more clearly and effectively with different personality types and how to deal with conflicts, or mitigate them when I saw potential for them down the road

·       I learned how to give readiness reports and launch a product in phases

·       I built strong bonds of trust and camaraderie with my co-workers and teammates as we persevered together to achieve our shared goals

·       It paved the way for my eventual career shift into a STEM field

The South Africa project was bad for a handful of reasons: The shadow of an uncertain future hung over me and my teammates. The end goal of the initiative was not made known to the entire company in the early phases of the project, so I had to keep the purpose of my activities shrouded in secrecy from anyone not directly assigned to the project. My direct managers who were a part of the project were not in agreement with its initiative, however they were carrying out orders from their leadership. My direct managers thought the plan to migrate business processes would be a failure, and that the expectations of a customer base primarily located in the United States would not take well to having their calls handled by agents in a completely different cultural context. My team and I were given direction to do our best, but my managers didn’t expect (or want in their hearts for) us to succeed because of what it would mean to them and their employees. This made it more difficult to report back when things were going well. However, things didn’t go well very often. The type of calls our agents handled were high stress by nature, so the patience of a caller was very thin by the time they reached an agent. It was extremely difficult to find an employee in the United States with the right mix of compassion, patience, thick skin, and ability to navigate a newly upgraded software platform while working to resolve the caller’s issue as quickly as possible. So finding the right mix of all these skills outside of the U.S. was very difficult. There was also a learning curve on how to use the correct terminology to ensure quick understanding between the agent and the caller. For example, when talking to a caller about where a car was parked, many of the Cape Town agents would say, “Is it in a parking bay?” What they meant by parking bay was “parking spot,” or “parking space” in a lined parking lot, and this sometimes led to confusion. There were several other little differences that would lead to quick confusion and frustration that took a lot of effort and time to try and work through. We could see from our customer reactions that things were not going well, however our partners in South Africa didn’t understand what the problems were and thought everything was going fine.

What role did you play in the team's performance?

In the software platform replacement project, I played the role of subject matter expert (SME), business analyst (BA), client, and product owner (PO). In all the roles I was responsible for helping the team and the overall project ensure that my areas in the business had all the needs identified and addressed for on time delivery of the new platform.

On the Cape Town project, I served as corporate trainer, coach, performance evaluator, advisor to management, consultant to my North America team direct reports, and cheerleader for the employees in South Africa who, if they were successful, would take the jobs of me and my co-workers back home. It was my responsibility to help them become the best they could be, teach them everything that I knew, and help them grow.

What challenges did you face during your time working with the team (or collaboration)?

On the software upgrade project I faced pressing deadlines, frustrated and exhausted project managers and sponsors, the need to work while I was on vacation with my children, the pain of not seeing the my favorite features that I had been dreaming of for years make it into the system because they didn’t offer sufficient value to the business, and running into communication issues early on with a particular software engineer who I unintentionally frustrated with inaccurate business requirements.

On the Cape Town, South Africa project the biggest obstacle I faced was being away from family for a month on the other side of the world. We were separated by time and distance. I had to spend 19 hours in the air, crossing an ocean to get to Cape Town, South Africa. The time zone difference was 8 hours. I was newly married, and before I left for South Africa, the project was already demanding time outside of work hours. I once joined a project meeting while on my honeymoon. This is not a favorite memory of that trip. Another obstacle was the prospect of losing my job and all the wonderful relationships I’d formed there. I’d been with the company at that point for over 20 years.

How did you overcome the challenge and complete the task?

To overcome some of the obstacles on the software platform replacement project, I had to learn how to be patient and examine what actions I was taking that contributed to anyone else’s frustrations or exhaustions and work to improve myself in those areas. Sometimes it simply involved making a deliberate effort to listen more actively, think a little more slowly and carefully about all the implications of a decision, and help give the relevant information that people needed and no more. In other cases, I had to learn how to adjust my communication style or think more deeply about how a requirement I had written could be interpreted by someone who didn’t have my level of expertise about the business. And in the case of the beloved features I dreamed up which never ended up seeing the light of day, I had to shift my perspective to one of gratitude for the fantastic features that did make it in, making so many things better for our user and customer experiences. I learned that you can’t have it all, and that’s OK, because you don’t really need it all.

In the South Africa experience, I overcame the prospect of losing my job by leaning on my peers who’d come with me from North America to work on the project. After our workdays in Cape Town, we would spend time at dinner talking through our anxiety about the future and lamenting how we would miss working with one another when the seemingly inevitable was to happen. This didn’t change the outcome of the project, but it did help us support each other through the emotions of what we were facing. Eventually, through no fault of ours, the project didn’t work out, and the company pulled the plug on it. A year or so later, our company began selling off different business divisions and laying off managers in the company to consolidate lines of business. When my boss and good friend whom I had worked with for 20 years was laid off, I began looking for another job. I eventually found a position with a SaaS (software as a service) company where I got to apply all my experience and expertise gained from the software platform replacement project.

Concerning the family obstacles that came with the South Africa project, while I was in Cape Town, my teenage daughter was in her first romantic relationship. While I was a literal 24 hours of actual travel time away from home, her boyfriend broke up with her. I couldn’t be there for her. It was tough. Fortunately, my wife, her new stepmom, was there and did great with her.

With the time difference, to stay connected with my family, I would work until about 10 or 11 at night, South Africa time, head back to my hotel, eat a late dinner, and join a video call with whatever family members were available. The calls would start around midnight or a little later my time, which was 4pm or later their time. We’d talk for about 30 minutes to an hour, or until I started falling asleep, but we made it work.

Today my daughter is a healthy adult with rich relationships, my wife and I are still happily married spending more time than ever together thanks to changes brought about by Covid, and I am currently enjoying stable employment with a new and supportive company as I grow my career in STEM and work on multiple collaborative projects and teams.