The group has been working to stabilize and improve a product that was developed by a tiger team of outsider contractors and handed over to the in-house team post-facto. The developers had to overcome many obstacles to come up to speed on the code, to learn the new programming languages and tools, and to try to keep the feature set moving forward. None of them had been involved in the original design, but it was now their product, and its problems were their problems.

At the time of this meeting, I was one part of a coaching team which had introduced a great many changes. We were trying to help the organization to build a “whole team” mentality that encompassed documentation, security, systems administration, QA, customer representatives, and developers alike. We’d attacked the problem of matrix management. We reorganized the seating floorplan. I think at some point we’d been an inconvenience to just about everybody. The developers were in the middle of their second two-week iteration.

On this occasion, the team was in the midst of a recurring production difficulty, and had been gathered into the CIO’s office to work through a top-20 list of problems to solve.

“Your attitude has been affecting other departments”, he said. “And I want to thank you for it.”