There is often a case that technical teams on projects tend to focus purely on ‘technical excellence.’\u00a0 What do I mean by ‘technical excellence?\u2019\u00a0 This is where we end up pushing what we believe to be the best way to deliver technical outcomes, or what we believe is the best\/right way to do agile.<\/p>\n
While there is no inherent problem with surfacing these ideas, practices or methodologies with our clients quickly, honestly and with passion – but doing so blindly can be a problem.<\/p>\n
As developers, we often focus on this \u2018technical excellence\u2019 for many reasons, among them being that we know them, we have used them and have gotten positive results.\u00a0 This creates a kind of comfort for us, especially when the customer\u2019s project does not follow these practices and methodologies the way we are used to.\u00a0 Trying to introduce or change these to suit what we know helps to create something familiar.<\/p>\n
What we should not forget though are our values – and more importantly that we are Equal Experts consultants which means we should be doing more than just writing code, and more than just pushing for what we believe is the best.\u00a0 Instead, we should be trying to understand and empathise at all times with what our customer has and is trying to achieve.\u00a0 By empathising with our customer\u2019s history we can get a deeper understanding of how they have gotten to the current state.\u00a0 By doing this we start to foster empathy for what they are doing, which then allows us to better walk the future road together.\u00a0 Empathy is a massive part of how we build relationships with our customers.\u00a0 Building relationships comes with understanding, and in a lot of cases accepting, some of the shortcomings that they may have at a technical level.<\/p>\n
By building these relationships it gives us the opportunity to gain the trust of our customers –\u00a0 which is an absolute must for us – as it is the way we want to influence and guide an engagement to benefit both parties, and specifically them. The crazy thing is that in reality this is the hardest part of an engagement.\u00a0 In most cases, even if there are technical challenges, we have known and proven strategies and experience to be able to solve these. Relationship building, on the other hand, is far more complex and what works with one customer may not work with another, and this is simply down to the fact that relationship building requires a lot of human interaction.\u00a0 We know humans come in all sorts of flavours personality-wise, and require different ways of engagement.\u00a0 So do organisations.\u00a0 They have a culture and a personality all of their own.<\/p>\n
This is when what I like to call the \u201cEqual Experts difference\u201d starts to shine.\u00a0 Our values are key to helping us navigate the difficulty that comes with relationship building.\u00a0 They do that by understanding that our major values are empathy, humility, pragmatism and respect.\u00a0 Each of those is paramount to building relationships, and in many ways can cross the borders of personality with ease because they speak to the core morals of any person or organisation.<\/p>\n
Relationship building becomes easier when we engage our customers from the perspective of our values, and so subsequently are able to more effectively deliver on the technical aspects of the engagement.\u00a0 It is at this junction that we must also remember that we are not just talking about building commercial relationships, but also relationships between our consultants, the teams, stakeholders and customers.\u00a0 Applying our values in those engagements also yields positive results.\u00a0 Not everything is about the big relationship, it’s about being consistent with how we apply our values.\u00a0 When both of these are being achieved, we start to build reputation and trust and that results in us being able to influence the partner’s behaviour and choices – a difficult and challenging position to be in, but one in which we ultimately can add the most value.<\/p>\n