Bogdan Mureşan

A while ago, I wrote an article addressing some important aspects in the world of client communication, or at least that was what I thought I was doing. I talked about how important it is to find a common ground when talking to somebody, especially if the people involved have different backgrounds. I also talked about the importance of emphasizing the value of what we are communicating, to point out what our ideas are bringing to the game. Since then, I have continued to improve my communication skills and I have discovered how important it is to pass these messages in a very efficient manner, especially when there are time constraints in the game. This is almost always the case when discussing with a client. There have been a couple of game changers for me lately, which I think have really helped me improve my efficiency when communicating. In this article I want to pass along these additional teachings.

In the last years, I have become more and more familiar with terms like “management by objectives”, “company objectives” and “personal objectives”. In the beginning, this was a real struggle, then it got worse, then it started to take shape and finally come around. The journey always started with company objectives which needed to be broken into personal objectives, and I must admit it was a challenge for me to apply the concepts even if they seemed easy to understand. It was really interesting to connect the dots and make them really work for me. In the hope that some of the learnings I took in the process will help others struggle less than me with this, I will highlight some of the findings here. And the interesting thing is that I don’t think that this applies only to the IT world, but has a high level of application in a lot of other areas.

A while ago I attended to an Agile conference here in Cluj. Among many interesting topics, presentations and discussions, I took part in a debate where the main idea was centered on the question “Is Velocity a metric or not”. There were a lot of ideas thrown around and the final conclusions were pretty good. At one point during that discussion I said that velocity is too contextual to be a metric. One of my colleagues asked if that was a good or a bad thing. Since I was not sure of an answer I picked the most neutral one and said that is neither good nor bad and it’s just a fact (actually a very important fact). I continued to think about that even after the debate ended and I started to add pros and cons in my mind to see if something contextual can be good or bad. I reached the conclusion that “contextual” used in the right way might be very good if we want to obtain the maximum efficiency from a situation.

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Theory says that 90 percent of a project manager’s work is communication and if theory says that, there must be some truth in it. The real important thing is the fact that communication is all over the place for the project manager and the theory makes him aware of this from its first chapters. What we often don’t realize is that polishing our communication skills starts much sooner and it is part of our job and our lives more that we knowingly realize. Referring to our work environment only, communication goes around among people with different communication skills and different backgrounds (e.g. developer, tester, administrator, hr).

The management world we are living in is constantly evolving. New frameworks, new methodologies are invented, re-invented and adapted in order to satisfy the need of a very dynamic market. Every time something new appears, first we fight against it and after its value it’s proved by some pioneers we are ready to make that thing the new religion for us.

Or the moment when trend beats logic. A while ago one colleague of mine wrote a very interesting article about best practices on Agile methodologies. If looking at the title you would expect a set of rules which would allow you to be the best Agile person on the planet, we pleasantly discover that in real life these rules are actual guidelines and adaptations to thousands of different situations. This article made me a little more aware of the next situation: how many times did you actually hear somebody saying: “On my project we implement Scrum 100%”. It’s like somebody would say “I have a perfect life”. It happens only from time to time and not on Earth.