Communication. Is. Key.

In every relationship, business or personal, communication is one of the (if not the) most important factors for success.

Once you stop communicating, you're not working as one anymore. Within Zivver both the IT & business team were talking about each other, not with one another. This contributed negatively to the polarization of viewpoints and the growth of the company.

“The growth phase of a tech company requires structure and a clear course.” ~~ Vincent van Donselaar

The main problem? The different priorities of the teams. 

The business department was selling things to the customer base that the IT team didn’t feel were a priority. IT wanted to focus on the existing technical debt and relevant features on the backlog. Not on the development of new features. The business department wanted to increase sales. Thus prioritized anything that allowed them to do so.

Observe. Advise. Execute

In these cases, it’s important to not choose sides and act as a bridge between the two teams. Having been a developer before evolving into an executive, our advisor Remi Caron knows how to be that bridge. He has sat at both ends of the table. 

These cases always start with observations. How does the IT team operate? What are their bottlenecks? Where does this misalignment come from? Soon after it became obvious that the team was missing structure and clear goals. This caused a lot of miscommunications and the teams worked towards different goals. If you’re talking to each other with different end results in mind, it’s hard to make everyone happy.

Explaining the situation to highler level management led to an agreement that the introduction of some structure would benefit both sides of the company. That’s when a new way of working, Scrumban, was introduced, agreed upon, and implemented. 

The key to the solution was to get the teams working towards the same goals again with the implementation of simple structures.

‍“Remi surprised me with his effective working method in which personal interaction and collaboration within the tech teams were paramount. By introducing simple structures and processes, he has contributed to the effectiveness and purpose of the organization as a whole.”

The Results

In these advisory jobs, the results are very hard to convert into numbers. Yet, the time spent resulted in an effective organization and a company that could get back to grow with one clear path. 

Just recently, Zivver got a place a as representative vendor in the 2021 ‘Market Guide for Email Security’ released by Gartner
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Vincent van Donselaar, one of the Co-founders, even told us that he had grown and learned personally by working with Remi. “At the time, I was able to learn a lot by watching Remi at work. That has proved to be a great bonus for me on a personal level. I look back on this with great satisfaction and pleasure.”

Communicate and don’t go into the blame game

Are you facing the same challenges? The key is to keep communicating with each other. Don’t blame one another, get to the root of the issue and find a suitable way out that serves most of everybody’s needs. Need some help from Remi? Request a free introduction call or schedule a meeting with us.