Monday, November 7, 2016

Listen to and Address the Concerns

If there is resistance to change, there may be good reasons for it. The way things are currently done have reasons embedded in them, even if those reasons are not immediately discernible.

When proposing a new way forward, the best thing I've found to do is to ask what the concerns will be with the new approach. At that point, a discussion can be had.

In the case of our proposed automation of testing deployments, the DBA's concern was around the state of the databases. Presently, changes in the Development environment can come from anyone. But by deploying to test manually, the DBA can see what's happening in that space. That way there are no surprises in Acceptance.

So if we are going to automate, that's the concern we need to address. If the DBA would be happy to get involved during the development - either writing the scripts or code reviewing the written scripts - then the concern is assuaged.

It would have been problematic to go ahead without getting the relevant stakeholders on board. It's far better to have them as part of the decision and the process. So to do that, listen to them.

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