I came across a post on the socials during a doom scrolling session the other night. Picture below for eventual context. The author had been to a talk by a LinkedIn company exe (I think) and posted their key takeaways from the talk, which really resonated.
One of the benefits of growing older, aside from the extra chin hair and having the telly volume up to 40 (but still needing to ask what are they saying), is that there comes a point when what is behind you is longer than what is ahead of you (deep, frightening).
But that provides a rich history and tapestry of experience to tap into, to put what is happening now into context and perspective.
Back in the day Yvonne Daymond , Sally Ringwood and I were young earnest junior BAs, fresh from the frontline, on a huge project for “the Ministry". BAs and the business were on one floor and the developers were on another - never to engage over our badly but enthusiastically written use cases (yes I'm that old) that were tossed over the fence.
This particular day we were working away and we suddenly became aware of a presence, an unusual temperature had fallen over the room, we looked up and there was a developer.
Not close enough to trigger a “hi”, but in that kind of menacing lurking zone.
He was a classic type that was around in those days - glasses, face full of hair, stained trousers, white crumpled shirt, with the plastic pocket liner that hadn't been able to contain the inevitable leak from his pens.
He just stood there staring, no doubt wondering what the hell we were, and who had let us out of the provinces (Taranaki, Hawkes Bay, Wanuiomata) and how we could ask for such ridiculous things in our requirements. (A1 - The system retrieves for the user all the stuff they have to manually retrieve now from 84 different systems)
As he just silently stood there we tried to play it cool and just kept up the pretense of working, with Yvie side mouthing in a semi panicked way "has he gone yet, has he gone yet".
And just like that, he was gone, never to be seen again. Never asked a thing about our ridiculous requirements, our frontline experience and needless to say the project never got implemented.
Fast forward to 24 hrs ago and it was me approaching a developer who probably doesn't even know what a pen is, and is bamboozled everytime I use the phrase “starter for 10”.
We needed some clarification around some feedback the client had sent us, so asked the dev what he wanted to do, his response was - I will jump on a call with them and have a chat - can show them what we have at the mo and we can see what bits need tweaking.
Do you need me in that chat? I asked, no all good was the reply, happy to take this.
As we have progressed through the years, the pace at which things happen, especially in IT, has sped up beyond belief. What used to take years can now take minutes. The benefit for clients is obvious but the downside is that the wrong things can be built incredibly quickly.
Having a dedicated and competent BA is now a luxury, so a lot of the core BA competency set now has to sit in others.
At Abletech we have a wonderfully engaged, curious and communicative group of developers who are not only able to do the coding, but also the discovery and the critical ongoing analysis tasks. Doing these things well is due to them enacting the fundamental skill of communicating through asking questions and more importantly listening to the answers.
They have a genuine desire to understand the business domain they are working in, as this provides a richness of context for them to deliver the needs of the business, through their beautifully written, AI supported code.
In the early days when we were partnering with Te Awanui Reeder for Koha.Kiwi, all i could hear coming out of the meeting room was Awa repeatedly saying yeah you get it, you get it - he was in the room with the devs, and there wasn't an open laptop in sight. They were talking about tikanga and some of the nuances of Te Ao Māori concepts that would eventually find their way into the code for the Koha solution.
So with all the advancements in IT, I truly believe that it is those fundamental human skills that will keep our clients safe and happy, and that will keep our devs growing into even more amazing human beings.
It is talent that will win the race.
And it needs to be all about Curiosity, Creativity, Communication, Courage and Compassion.
And it's now me with the full face of hair, and a secret desire for a plastic pocket liner.
