You can boil down a great relationship between Development and IT with one word: Trust. If you’re in IT, let me ask you something: If you report whatever issue you might have (be it a bug, minor glitch, total malfunction, or anything else) do you think your development team will take you seriously? Ok, now here’s a question for the developers: Can you honestly say that you can be rest assured that your IT will report any problem they notice? Can you be 100% in saying that they will give you a thorough explanation of what’s happening?
It’s possible you instinctively answered yes to these questions, but did you mean it? Can you ever be truly sure? How do other organizations maintain trust in their tech-dev relationship?
Continuous Business Development
If you’re thinking about reading anymore of this article, it’s time to take a pause for a second. You’re here because you want a fantastic relationship and community within your business, and you want a professional grade job to achieve that relationship. So why not let professionals help you out? Grid Dynamics offers continuous development improvement and they can do tons to help you save time, money, and effort in the process. If you’re ready to get help, here are some things to keep in mind to improve your relationship overall.
Setting up expectations
Right off the bat, it’s time to make sure every party knows what’s expected of them, and also what they can expect of each-other. This is a great builder of trust for a number of reasons. Namely, when people have a mutual understanding of what they can realistically count on each-other for, they gain a respect for the system as a whole, and thus trust that they can rely on it. This is crucial for building that relationship and symbiosis between employees. When you communicate your goals clearly, you are showing everyone that they belong to a team, an organism, something that needs a strong connection between itself to function.
When you’ve figured out everyone’s needs, it makes it easier to see what people can actually provide. This exercise can really put some amazing insight into what is going on within your company, and what should realistically be happening. What if you thought everything was going swell, then you compared needs with expectations. You might make shocking discoveries. Perhaps the developers are getting stretched thin and they’re holding up the company. Maybe everyone is overworked, underworked, or no one is near any of their goals. When you figure out specifically what you want, it clears up a lot of decisions.
One of the biggest ways that leaders fail to create a trustworthy environment is by not owning up to your mistakes. If you mess up, don’t put it on employees, or else something ever more damaging happens: They will put their own mistakes on each-other. As a leader, it’s up to you to be accountable and be the model employee. After all, what incentive do your IT and developers have to follow orders if their boss can’t follow his own orders?
