As a firm believer of connecting with people, I truly enjoyed my most recent visit which aimed at one thing and one thing only. MEET THE TEAM FACE TO FACE. It has been an awesome experience for me to meet the team from Bangalore & Coimbatore. What initially started as a discussion about a simple idea turned out to be a concrete, well-laid & very well organized plan for ALL the colleagues to meet with each other.
Most of the organizations talk about Agile transformation, self-organized teams, high productivity, innovation and so on. I strongly believe that NONE of this would work without a strong team. Here, I saw a problem. The team from various organizations, working remotely for years together for the development & enhancement of the same product did not even see each other (most of them). This is really embarrassing and and totally unproductive. Personally, I've been wanting to see those team members who always were in the dark, talking in to the phone from the other side and yet still had great contributions towards the product.
I sincerely wanted to make an attempt to change this without getting in to the bureaucratic constraints like travel budget restrictions and so on. So, since I already had plans to go HOME, I added some little personal plans to make this extra trip to where my friends were thought it would be more effective if I asked ALL to come to one place. I must admit, some really cool magic happened during the entire week. From Monday to Friday, we sat together, ate together, chatted together and worked together to talk about current critical topics, to bridge any knowledge gaps that the operations team had and also talk about I.N.N.O.V.A.T.I.V.E topics. After I met my colleagues who now became very good friends, I realized that innovation CANNOT take place if the team is NOT TOGETHER....! At least once a year, if the team would get a chance to meet with others face to face, trust me, magic happens. We discussed some of the critical topics to get a common view, had a chat about the way forward for some technical topics, some foundational topics for filling the knowledge gaps and many more....! Guess what, we had our technical team meeting as well together with our Scrum Master. Not in front of the computers, not in a stinking conference room, not via those fancy audio conferencing phones & head-sets but on the lawn outside the building which was different, refreshing, novel & productive enough. Could never forget it.
Ok. That was all about the working week. But we are not done yet. We got together on a nice & sunny Saturday and had an awesome lunch party together. This was really amazing and the team actually was extremely engaged & relaxed. I was glad & sad at the same time as it was time to say good bye for then.
God knows I want to make another trip next year..and the year after.. and the year after...! I love this team. Take a look at the fun we had for about a week.
