Ownership

My story on Verizon (see below) is actually a story about ownership. I am going to use this in my staff training going forward. This is a classic story about lack of ownership. Throughout the story, nobody from Verizon did anything wrong (some were nicer than others but they all follow the book) but somehow when combined, it makes a miserable experience for the customer.

That is the same thing when development and testing just 'do their part' and don't take ownership of the whole thing. I told developers "Your bug is not fixed until confirmed by tester and it is your job to ensure that they can verify your fix." I also told testers "Your testing report is not done until the developer truely understand what you meant and know where to start."

Most project puts the ownership on the project manager, while this works, it's not scalable. In my Verizon story, had there be a project manager, a point-of-contact, everything will be much better. However, I think a better solution is for a company to have a culture of ownership throughout the organization. Everybody is expected to take the job beyond their boxes. I usually explain this by telling people to tag on 20% of work on either end of the box. They are expected to do 140%. That is why people love to work with us and why we win. This is ownership.