I don't have excessive experience on how consultants do their jobs, I've been one only for a very short period of time in my career. The consultants that I see seem to be self-certain people, some very aware of their specialties and limitations, but all taking significant steps to go about helping organizations transform in some way. With the big visible cost number per day, there's an expectation of impact. Consultants being realistic, the impact isn't usually an overnight transformation, but a slow movement of changing perspectives and habits and including skills to stretch the status quo.
I've done short gigs with companies. Most recent one would be one where I first helped assess skills and potential of tester candidates delivering a video of pair testing and report on what to pay attention to in that video and then later training the hire into testing the product, again through strong-style pair testing with me never touching the keyboard. My "consulting" gigs are usually very contained, less open ended than what I see other consultants doing. And all this comes from the fact that I work as "just a tester" in some organization. Now F-Secure, and other product / customer organizations before that. I love the company ownership of the solution and the business development aspects, and I've always felt I get into that all the way immersing myself into the organization and its purpose.
Today I was listening to Sal Freudenberg Lascot talk about Neurodiversity / inclusive collaboration and I was thinking about how much nicer it was to think of aspects of being neurologically different in our needs of how we feel comfortable working than talking of being introvert/extrovert/ambivert. This thinking also helped me outline my favored style of working in organizations that I've been framing in contrast to styles of some people who try to achieve similar results.
I tend to avoid pushing people directly to do stuff. I'm very uncomfortable telling my team to do a retrospective (I mentioned that 20+ times, each time marking one in my bookkeeping to see how many mentions it took to get it done - 23 was the tally). I'd like to tell my automation tester colleagues to go pair with other automation testers because they just write the same code and it makes no sense to me to have personal repositories, but instead of telling, I again mention. Over time, I will show specific examples of problems, hoping people will take up solving those.
The same goes with me wanting to try out mob programming. I go and pair with people who work on exploratory testing in areas I'm learning deeply about right now. I organize practice mobs on areas I work on, but I don't push people to mob, I wait for them to volunteer. I keep the theme out in the open. I point out how the distributed way of working takes us weeks to complete some tasks that could be done in a day together. I share my excitement about doing learning like this with others. But I don't easily go and just book a time when we will do that. I give people time, assessing applicability of my perspectives and slowly moving in the themes of value. And I have an overall goal: I want us to feel happy and included. I want us to feel useful and valuable. I want us to make a difference together through the software we're creating. I want us to be able to say that we get better at what we're doing, every day.
I experiment with everything. The way I mention things and the ways they get caught. The ways I can personally complete a task. With every action, there's a response. And I spend a fair amount of my time finding patterns in those responses. I love the introspection of my own responses. And people around me occasionally hate that I overanalyze their reactions.
I realize I'm a consultant in a way, even if I am an internal consultant, and employee. I'm around to serve my chosen purpose, share my love of testing and great products, and it's ok that the changes I participate in take years and years to accomplish.
Looking back, I'm super proud of what we became at my previous place of work. From monthly releases and loads of bugs in production, we went into daily releases and rare occasions of bugs in production. From individuals avoiding talking to others we went into a well-working remote team that got together twice a week. From me feeling alone with my interests in testing, the change to the team caring for testing and me caring for technical solutions was immense. From people feeling they had no power, we went into a team of strong experts who cared for all activities from value to delivering it. The broke the ideas of working on an assembly line each with our tasks, and contributed according to both our strengths and stretches. We opened every corner of single code ownership and cleaned it up to be team's. We dropped all work estimates, and worked on a limited number of things at a time, delivering things in pairs (or mobs) as quickly as we could. We worked out ways to include work on technical debt, which we understood that came from the fact that we were learning: the things we coded a year ago needed an update, because every one of us was a better version of ourselves now.
When I look at consultants, I wonder if their different style of communicating and more direct driving of change is something I should practice. And I recognize my discomfort. Ir's not that I don't speak out. It's just that my preferred ways of communicating are slow. I like to take my time to see if my proposals will actually improve things. And I see that I regularly dismantle implementations of my great ideas at a time that others did not notice yet that they are not really working.
Not a consultant, yet a consultant. Aren't we all?
I've done short gigs with companies. Most recent one would be one where I first helped assess skills and potential of tester candidates delivering a video of pair testing and report on what to pay attention to in that video and then later training the hire into testing the product, again through strong-style pair testing with me never touching the keyboard. My "consulting" gigs are usually very contained, less open ended than what I see other consultants doing. And all this comes from the fact that I work as "just a tester" in some organization. Now F-Secure, and other product / customer organizations before that. I love the company ownership of the solution and the business development aspects, and I've always felt I get into that all the way immersing myself into the organization and its purpose.
Today I was listening to Sal Freudenberg Lascot talk about Neurodiversity / inclusive collaboration and I was thinking about how much nicer it was to think of aspects of being neurologically different in our needs of how we feel comfortable working than talking of being introvert/extrovert/ambivert. This thinking also helped me outline my favored style of working in organizations that I've been framing in contrast to styles of some people who try to achieve similar results.
I tend to avoid pushing people directly to do stuff. I'm very uncomfortable telling my team to do a retrospective (I mentioned that 20+ times, each time marking one in my bookkeeping to see how many mentions it took to get it done - 23 was the tally). I'd like to tell my automation tester colleagues to go pair with other automation testers because they just write the same code and it makes no sense to me to have personal repositories, but instead of telling, I again mention. Over time, I will show specific examples of problems, hoping people will take up solving those.
The same goes with me wanting to try out mob programming. I go and pair with people who work on exploratory testing in areas I'm learning deeply about right now. I organize practice mobs on areas I work on, but I don't push people to mob, I wait for them to volunteer. I keep the theme out in the open. I point out how the distributed way of working takes us weeks to complete some tasks that could be done in a day together. I share my excitement about doing learning like this with others. But I don't easily go and just book a time when we will do that. I give people time, assessing applicability of my perspectives and slowly moving in the themes of value. And I have an overall goal: I want us to feel happy and included. I want us to feel useful and valuable. I want us to make a difference together through the software we're creating. I want us to be able to say that we get better at what we're doing, every day.
I experiment with everything. The way I mention things and the ways they get caught. The ways I can personally complete a task. With every action, there's a response. And I spend a fair amount of my time finding patterns in those responses. I love the introspection of my own responses. And people around me occasionally hate that I overanalyze their reactions.
I realize I'm a consultant in a way, even if I am an internal consultant, and employee. I'm around to serve my chosen purpose, share my love of testing and great products, and it's ok that the changes I participate in take years and years to accomplish.
Looking back, I'm super proud of what we became at my previous place of work. From monthly releases and loads of bugs in production, we went into daily releases and rare occasions of bugs in production. From individuals avoiding talking to others we went into a well-working remote team that got together twice a week. From me feeling alone with my interests in testing, the change to the team caring for testing and me caring for technical solutions was immense. From people feeling they had no power, we went into a team of strong experts who cared for all activities from value to delivering it. The broke the ideas of working on an assembly line each with our tasks, and contributed according to both our strengths and stretches. We opened every corner of single code ownership and cleaned it up to be team's. We dropped all work estimates, and worked on a limited number of things at a time, delivering things in pairs (or mobs) as quickly as we could. We worked out ways to include work on technical debt, which we understood that came from the fact that we were learning: the things we coded a year ago needed an update, because every one of us was a better version of ourselves now.
When I look at consultants, I wonder if their different style of communicating and more direct driving of change is something I should practice. And I recognize my discomfort. Ir's not that I don't speak out. It's just that my preferred ways of communicating are slow. I like to take my time to see if my proposals will actually improve things. And I see that I regularly dismantle implementations of my great ideas at a time that others did not notice yet that they are not really working.
Not a consultant, yet a consultant. Aren't we all?
