One of my favorite tricks around changing how a team does something is to get other people to drive the change for you.
This especially applies if you’re coming into an organization as an outsider. Most people are initially somewhat skeptical of outsiders and you need to earn their trust. This sometimes takes a long time, and you might want to change some things before you’ve built up the political capital to drive it yourself.
When I started on my current project, all of the QA testing was done manually, and QA people weren’t involved in the process at all until after the code had been written. As a result, they would get features to test and not have any idea of what they had to test, and many times they couldn’t trust that the requirements were even up to date.
The solution that I was hoping for was to get QA people to meet with developers and BAs before the code was written so that they could come up with a test strategy and acceptance criteria. That way they would have input up front, and developers could automate all or most of the acceptance tests, which would save QA a lot of time. But I didn’t want to bring it up myself.
So I would ask questions in meetings. We all agreed there was a problem, so I would ask everyone what ideas they had to fix it. Eventually someone would give the answer I was looking for. “That’s a great idea!”, I’d say, “How do you think we should do that?” Now it wasn’t my solution, it was someone else’s. That person feels good because they came up with a good idea (that eventually ended up working), and since that person is actually on the team and doing the work, they might have more credibility than an outsider like me.
I would much rather have someone else get the credit for coming up with the ideas, because I think that it gives the idea a better chance of success, and when it works, it encourages people to try and think of more ways to improve things. If one person comes in and tries to drive and enforce all of the change, it’s very easy for people to discredit that person (maybe even just in their mind) and try and fight the change. But when the ideas are coming from multiple different people on the team, now you have more and more people buying in because they’re the ones coming up with the ideas!
When I think of a “coach”, I think of someone who helps other people find the path to success. You can try to push them in that direction and they might turn around and fight you instead. Or you can help them use their own ideas and expertise that they already have to find their own way.
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