In our very busy lifestyle, it is not always that we pause to look back on the way we came and feel proud of both our achievements and the lessons we have learned, individually and as a group.
At the dawn of 2011, Conscires was a three-member team conducting 3 trainings per month in 5 cities across the USA. Today, as the sun sets on 2011, we are an eleven member group managing an average 12 trainings per month, across 16 cities in three countries. If that isn't reason enough to rejoice, I don't know what is.
It's been an incredible journey, to put it mildly. One of the most important things we learnt as a team was to perform as a team.
There has been a bunch of interesting lessons during our journey together, derived from experiences that left us embarrassed or mad or shocked or rippling with laughter. In other words, there were several mistakes that we made, and scampered to rectify. We see them not as failures, but as opportunities that helped us learn and grow.
One such was the time when a couple of us were reviewing the training pages on our website late into the night. After a hectic day, both were exhausted and disoriented. That probably was the only excuse for almost sending a trainer, who was to take a class in Boston, to Seattle, and asking all the trainees in Boston to attend the class at Denver. We learned that an extra pair of eyes is always essential to spot mistakes just before deploying or publishing. We also discovered that if we start laughing at midnight over foolish mistakes, it is not easy to stop the laughter!
Not as funny was the time when discount codes to be sent to some trainees (offering reduced rates) got mixed up. In another instance, instead of allowing for two free discount codes, we enabled an 'unlimited' number, and realised our mistake only when a large number of free registrations poured in. In both cases, we made quick amendments to ensure our attendees were not at a disadvantage.
Much of our training promotional activities happen through social media groups. It was a difficult episode for one of us when the postings done on one such group were termed as spam and other members posted spiteful comments. Well, we learned to promote our programs in such a way that others do not feel overwhelmed by them!
As our trainings expanded to other cities and enquiries began to flow in, we faced a problem in handling customer queries. More than once, a couple of us replied separately to the same query without letting each other know. No damage was done since the replies were identical, except that the customer got two emails each. Since then we devised methods to determine who was going to reply and, also ensured that the rest of the customer support team were kept in the loop to avoid duplication.
Most rewarding of all has been the way we practised what we preach – the implementation of Scrum within the organization, adapted to bring only the best out of our distributed team, taking into consideration our limitations and the nature of our work.
As I said, it's been an incredible journey that promises to get better and better in the coming years.
(With inputs from the entire team at Conscires.)
