Creating Focus in a distracted world

I’m doing a talk in June about moving from chaos to order in the context of leading and managing a Quality Engineering team that has a core focus on testing. As part of this, I am building in public my thoughts around this in the hope to help other Leaders/Managers out there. Along with that, I’ve been thinking about, what have I actually achieved in the last year? What have I learnt and how do I move forward? I believe one of the underrated skills of a Manager is the ability to create focus. It is one of my big learnings and also, achievements in the last year. I can walk through that in more detail, but let’s start with what chaos means in this context.

What does chaos mean?

It sounds like one of those end of the world movies like 28 days later (zombie apocalypse film), War of the Worlds (alien invasion) or the Day after Tomorrow (disaster film). Chaos might simply be:

• Team members feeling all over the place and multi-tasking between several tasks
• Not working on what’s important
• A lot of information to digest and feeling overwhelmed by it all
• A lack of structure to help team members succeed

As a result of all of this:

• A poor team reputation
• A lack of deep work, so only doing superficial testing.
• A lack of business value wasting time/money to the business
• Frustration amongst team members
• Not enough focus on things that matter

Be ready for the challenge!

Walking into something like this is not easy at all. It is something I have done before in terms of building everything from the ground up, however, there is not one size that fits all. The business, people, tech, processes are all different. However, I believe my enjoyment of problem solving has been a factor in the success.

Observe and Learn

At first what I did was observe and learn. One of the key things I did in my onboarding was speak to as many people as possible. This has been crucial in the success of turning things around — building up relationships with people that can help you. In my situation the group of people I worked with were very quality/testing orientated and were open to hearing thoughts and opinions. This made the transition much easier having so many people’s backing. I wrote this blog post about onboarding a while back and I would highly recommend it! https://fishouthebox.medium.com/onboarding-experiment-9a4408ee0fb7 I also had a very good boss that trusted me in my abilities to lead and do in the way that I saw fit.

Focus on one or two problems at a time

It was hard receiving feedback that highlighted the poor reputation of the team. My mission was to turn this around and support each of them. They were good people, but simply did not have the structure to be successful. One of the hardest things I had to do was to be frank with them to say the reputation of this team is at an all time low and I needed their backing to make some changes to turn this around. I feel by having this difficult conversation with them it allowed us to work collaboratively together to find solutions.

QE strategy and Principles

The first thing we did was create a Quality Engineering (QE) Strategy and QE Principles together. The problem we had were separate strategies for functional and non functional and as a result it was not clear on the direction we were taking. So I made the call to combine the two to drive focus. The rationale is that I find the non functional terminology unhelpful because it’s too wide a net. I often use the Heuristic Test Strategy and the quality criteria defined in that, which is a much more useful picture.

Then from there we created Quality Engineering Principles. These are things that we believe we must consider or do. These were things like risk and value, testability, automation focus and continuous improvement. I’ve done a lot of work in relation to Principles and have shared them via this blog or talks/workshops. I’m happy to discuss this with anyone. You can find a list of the blogs if you scroll to the bottom of this post.

Changed the environment

The next thing I did was change the environment that my team members are in , moving from a separate team to embedding into the product teams. In the context there were product teams, however, the QE team members were sitting outside of those and tested projects later on. This was frustrating because often they had to play catch up with information and resulted in other team members having to go over what had already been covered. This therefore, was no fault to the team members, but the environment itself. So in this learning I urge when you think about problems first look at the environment your team members are working in. Are they in an environment that allows them to succeed?

Continuous Feedback — Both ways!

The next thing I focused on (and continue to do) is to give feedback to my team members or they give feedback to me. Whether that is a public appreciation of the great work they had just done or some constructive feedback to improve. One of the things that stood out to me very recently is that the recommended training one of my team members went on, they gave the feedback on the lines of ‘I understand what you’ve been trying to do now’. So yes remember as a manager you can coach and mentor, but you don’t have to do it alone. Find good blog articles, conferences or training to share with your team members.

What’s also very important is to ask your team members for feedback and ideas on the problems at hand. They will have better ideas than you at times, so it’s so important you ask and listen to them.

Peer review

The next area we looked at were our processes and one of the top ones we focused on was supporting each other in the terms of a Peer Review process. Whether you were creating a Test Plan, Test design orTest Summary report. This leveled up the quality of work by getting diverse perspectives on an output, which I believe resulted in improvements to the reputation of the team. What I found quite crucial was a team member created the process (not myself), which helped engagement and traction.

Knowledge Retention

Another key problem was technical and product knowledge. There was such a wide range of knowledge needed to do the job. How we solved this was by looking at improving our documentation for knowledge sharing purposes. I believe this is another key area of the success we had in improving our reputation in that we did not have to ask over and again for the same knowledge because it was written down. Writing good documentation is a very key skill that often doesn’t get enough attention in my view. One of my team members said to me recently on the lines of leaving it better than you found it, which has stuck with me.

Test Management Tool

As part of knowledge retention and documentation we invested in a Test Management tool. Previously there were documented tests all over the place and the business investing in a tool helped store all the information in a single place, which made a big difference.

Only the beginning

The above I would describe as only the beginning of bringing order to chaos. There were a lot of other things like hiring, creation of team goals, QE Team meetings, setting a culture of continuous improvement, ways of working and most likely more that I haven’t thought about.

My Learnings.

• Focus is not only for my team members, but also myself. It is very difficult to remain focused at times as a manager when there are a lot of stakeholder demands, topics to discuss and problems to solve. It can be very exhausting. I have found a work journal to be very beneficial in prioritising my efforts.
• I cannot keep up with the technical detail across a number of teams and nor is there a need to. This is where I lean into the expertise of my team members to lead as they best see fit.
• I’ve had a lot of moments of doubts, especially in the time where I was not looking after myself properly. In moments of doubt, remember, that I’m going to figure it out like I always have.
• Fix the environment for your team members to thrive!
• Change is a marathon not a sprint. Have a bucket of patience! :-)