Organizations driven by internal customers

I was coming from a discussion I had with one of my friend who is working for a MNC and heading a team of about 100 people here in India. This team is responsible for providing the development & testing support for the parent organization located somewhere else.

He was so frustrated in motivating the team over here. From his discussion I could figure out that there are primarily two major issues
a) The team here feels that
- their opinion is not being counted by the members of the parent organization
- they are getting micro managed
- they don't have freedom in doing certain things in a way they wanted.
- they don't have any visibility into the product / business roadmap

b) Some members of the parent organization feels that
- people are spending time here, but the output is not coming
- team members are not completely able to understand the task at hand and this is resulting in schedule delays
- the lack of proper communication by the respected managers sometimes making them to talk to the engineers directly.

Well I could really understand the frustration from my friend who really played a key role in building this team, but I was not at all surprised.

I was telling him that this is a mindset issue at working level from both the sides and it must be addressed by people who have right attitude in understanding and respecting the customer from his team.

In my opinion whether it is internal customer or external customer "customer is king". The very existence of an organization is because of its customers. If customers are not willing to give business then none of us have any role to play it is as simple as that.

When individuals join organizations they go with a mindset I must do this, I must do that, and my opinion must be respected, I should not be micro managed etc etc. For example many people make strong assumption about themselves that they must only be involved in development activities and not in any testing related activities. Many a times they underestimate scripting, automation related activities and they feel they are working for a great MNC and they should not do these things. Similarly some experienced team members, and first level managers feel that they must be involved in all technical / product discussions by the parent organization. They feel that they should be seen in such a way that they are simply not executing the requirements given to them by their immediate customers in the parent org, but they are really capable of much more.

Well none of these are wrong expectations, but you need to understand how well you are positioned today to set these expectations on your immediate customers.

This is where the management has to build a culture in an organization in making the customers happy first before you start influencing them. Say if every senior member in the team understand that we must deliver what was requested by doing 100% justification whether it is development, testing, scripting etc etc it becomes that much easy to make the rest of the team understand. Get to the bottom of the details and build relationship with peers in the parent organization in meeting the set targets. How good you do your ground work really determines how successful you are in building such a relationship with your peers.

Every organization has to go through this phase initially and there is no short cut to it. The beauty is when the team grows from 100 to 1000 all these 100 members can proudly say that we made this happen. The moment you are responsible for delivering more you are in more command to understand the big picture, start influencing the customers and may be directly start interacting with external customers and so on.

Now the question is is it good to be part that initial 100 or to be part of that 1000 when everything is smooth. If we decide that we want to be part of the initial 100 do we really bother about whether we are doing testing, scripting, development etc. Do we really bother about whey some people are asking daily status updates, probing into lot of details. These are so small things to handle when we go with right mindset.