New job = new work-flow procedures? … not always…

A new job usually equals new procedures or no procedures at all.

I’ve recently changed job and I’ve joined a small company where I was expecting to spend my first week  learning the flow of procedures to follow, but as you often find, in small companies, there were no procedures. So , after being a bit surprised, I thought that it would be a good starting point for the business and an opportunity to develop my own experience if I tried to create procedures that fit and ease the work-flow.

Here is what I think is a good checklist of things to consider when approaching new procedures:

• The first important thing is to encourage all the team members to be happy to try new approaches and ideas.
• At the beginning avoid words such as “Agile”, “Retrospectives”, “Pair Programming”, “XP”, “Refactoring” and “Unit Tests”. This comes from my personal experience,  where I’ve met managers/colleagues that at just the sound of these words have become worried and doubtful or they have tried to look interested and then never supported the idea.
• Discuss things openly not just keeping ideas to yourself.
• Try to be patient and sympathetic with colleagues when they  over defend current working practices just because that’s the way it’s always been done. Understand that people are apprehensive of changes and new ideas.
• Adapt your procedures to what people feel comfortable with. Don’t stick to procedures that receive bad feedback from the majority of team members but also have confidence in your ideas and don’t quit at the first obstacle, give it a second chance.
• Buy a couple of white boards and plenty of post-it.