Following on from Good to Great (rules to live by) post.

One thing that constantly irks me is the “It’s not my job” syndrome. This is most apparent in call centers “Sorry I can’t help you with this, let me transfer you to..” [cue another 10min wait time]. We’ve all been on the receiving end of that one and can attest to how we get annoyed by it. This also manifests itself in development teams and developed systems.

The biggest impact you as a IT person (be it developer, analyst, project manager) can make, is take a ‘full circle’ approach to your interactions both within a team and directly with clients and your developments. What do I mean ? take extra time out of your day when faced with an issue, that’s not technically your, or your apps responsibility, to solve it completely for your client or team member. Or if you can’t solve it, take ownership in handing it off properly**. The end result is to have the initiator of the request client, user etc, not required to go elsewhere to solve their initial problem.

Why would we possibly want to do this, when our time could be better served browsing Digg, checking out Facebook, breaking out the office xbox ?

What makes a great developer ? Outside of obligatory technical and problem solving skills which go without saying, the differentiator between good developers and great developers I think simply boils down to understanding, empathy and respect for your client. Having a cross functional developer that can write code and talk to a client in plain english is an amazingly huge (and seemingly rare) asset to any team or studio. As the world slowly moves away from waterfall development I think this is going to be increasingly important.

I’ve worked with the uber algorithm generator russion rocket scientists, the fresh out of university bumbling junior guy, the know it all with an ego the size of africa, the one that wants to debate every minute detail until they forgot why they were debating it, the one that will fight to the death to not change the feature they just implemented.

Every time the one developer that’s stood out, and had clients want to work with them, were those that sat down and understood the business problem at hand and were empathetic to their clients needs. If you spend those hours/days up front and actually listen to your client. Put yourselves in their shoes, and understand how they do business and want to do it better. You are going to go a lot further than those who tell the customer how to do business. Here’s my rules to live by: