Delivering value is taken as read, everyone understands that if you’re not delivering value then the company’s not making a profit, and so they won’t have any money to pay you. If you want value you need to make sure not only that you understand what you’re doing but the guy who needs you to do it, or the people who need you to do, do too.
The customer and the project owner are both great ideas, but often they are actually a bunch of people. They all need to understand what you’re doing as well, and that needs to evolve as you evolve the solution and they evolve their thinking. If you’re not getting that communication right, the chances are that to some degree you are spending your time on something that isn’t actually going to generate profit for the company. Their idea might suck, and if you think it sucks you’re job is to not tell them that it sucks in so many ways, it’s to help get them to a position where they’re going to tell you that it doesn’t suck.
It’s all down to communication, I think it’s just fundamental. A team who is really moving fast is a very loud team. That was something I noticed actually, when I joined my current company, how quiet it was. At first I thought, “Oh that’s a bit odd” and then eventually I started to think “This is a real problem.” It was quiet because we had ten engineers sitting in a room all doing slightly different things. If you don’t have communication it doesn’t work; you’d have to go back to the old way of doing it. Electronic communication is only half communication, because it often gets in the way.
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