When you are working in a environment that almost similar to startup (by this I mean one person handles more than one role), you need to cultivate the following as habits:
1) Plan your day - My body is so programmed that it exactly can sense the time without a alarm system! This happens with many of you right? As soon as it is 1:00pm, you are hungry, as soon as it is 6:00am, you are awake, etc. You really do not need to look at the clock for this. Along similar lines, before you reach for office, you need to tell yourself that "Hey, these are the tasks, meeting, etc for the day and lets have timings for each one of them". Hence, every morning before you reach office, plan your day!
2) Execute your planned day - Do not try to change the planned timings at all until unless it is absolutely necessary. There is really no harm in saying "NO". Respect others timings to get respect for your schedule. Reach on time for meeting, be prepared for meeting, ask suitable questions, have discipline in the meeting and last but not the least realize that you are important in a meeting because some decisions will impact you hence be alert. Make sure that every meeting ends with a conclusive decision and a set of action items with named resources. Else the ball keeps on bouncing among people. Before the meeting, the person who runs the show should define the agenda and give enough material for one to come prepared in the meeting.
3) Task execution - All the above have been talking about meetings, now coming to task in hand. Before you execute a task (a developer to write a code), ask yourself the following:
- Who is your consumer to the task I do as in who is the end user of the task. e.g. for a corporate site, internet users are consumers (external)
- Have I heard my end users enough to identify what they want, what they do not, why they want, how they want, when they want and where do they want? If not, get answers to all the questions.
- After you get the answers, did the end user buy these answers. Get them knowing the same.
- Identify check points to inform your end consumer on what is happened till now.
- When the task is completed, inform the end user via email specifically telling the him/her what all needs to be done.
- Within the system, identify components/systems that get impacted by the task (integration points)
- Follow the same that you would have done for the end user
- Please take more time in designing rather than coding.
4) Know your role and know your KRAs - This is very important in a professional environment. Always have your role defined very clearly and know your key result areas. You will be assessed only on your KRAs. If there in less clarity, talk to your managers.
5) Get into the habit of assessing yourself to find out if you have improved and if you are justifying your KRAs. If not, make sure you let your manager know that you need help! There is really no harm to let your manager know your weakness provided you have the attitude to overcome the same. Trust your managers!
6) Attitude - Remember, "Attitudes are contagious. Are yours worth catching? " Carry attitude that has positive vibes. Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
Ok guess, too much of gyan for the day :-)
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