Be quality-driven, and growth-minded
Growth doesn't just "happen." We work for it. It is a process:
- We do great work because we are quality-driven
- We let the right people know about it because we are growth-minded
🏅 Quality
What is quality?
We define quality work as
- A deliverable in its finished form
- that is suitable for its intended purpose while satisfying customer expectations
How do we achieve quality?
1. Finish what you started
Remember that for everything you leave neglected or unfinished, someone else will have to take care of it — or worse: clients and prospects will see it.
Be equally wary of the opposite: ruinous perfectionism. Its consequence is to never ship a deliverable or exploding the budget (and destroying profitability). In this case, beware of spending too long, then "achieving your failure."
Meet your deadlines
Deadlines are not indications, or “I will try to do this by [date]”.
You must communicate realistic deadlines for your work, and communicate accordingly. We will always prefer deadlines that are realist and that you meet, over overly optimistic and unreliable ones.
2. Meet or exceed the agreed-upon quality with your clients
If you are reading this, we already trust you to be a caring professional. Assuming you did your best, there are three outcomes possible for every project:
- Failing to meet expectations: we have all been there. Failure happens. It is OK. However, in your projects, you should ensure that this does not come as a surprise in the end. There are ways to mitigate and justify underperformance that are perfectly acceptable to a client. The key here is to identify the issue as soon as possible and seek assistance from your colleagues immediately for adequate damage control.
- Meeting expectations: well-done. It is now about ensuring you finish the project well and identify follow-up opportunities that might be of interest to Agilytic.
- Exceeding expectations: exceeding expectations is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it is excellent, so kudos are in order. On the other, be careful not to appear as if you had willfully undersold the potential as it could erode trust with the client.
Your colleague can be your "client."
If you own internal tasks, please consider your colleague as an "internal client": apply the same level of care to your work as you would with an external, "paying" client, and communicate accordingly. Otherwise, someone must always pay the price of low quality.
If you feel like you are coasting, say so.
If you feel things are too easy, let us know. There are plenty of things to work on and opportunities to help you grow professionally by nudging you outside your comfort zone.
3. Document (the active verb)
Documentation is the bridge between quality and clarity. It is often overlooked, yet you must always take time to document your work. Depending on the context, it can take the form of a github, notion page, a presentation or meeting minutes…
While documentation is essential, you must use your best judgement for the adequate channel and complexity of that documentation. It is equally unprofessional to leave an important project undocumented as it is to over-document menial tasks.
Always clarify with your colleagues and clients the expected documentation format at the start of every project.
📈 Your contribution to growth
We have three fundamental areas for growth, and you should be mindful of your impact all of them:
- Growing our team, so that we can deliver on more complex projects at the same time.
- Growing our client base, so that everybody gets to work on diverse projects.
- Growing our collective competencies, so we get better as time goes on.
Grow our team
The more colleagues get involved in our recruitment efforts, the better. This includes participating in recruitment events, the recruitment process, or any other initiatives.
We recommend you brush up on our Hiring principles if you are interested in contributing more.
Grow our client base
Everyone has a role to play in identifying opportunities and people that could benefit from our help.
Depending on your responsibilities and ambitions, we will be here to help you grow your business development game (as seen in Commercial principles).
Until then, all we ask is for you to have an elementary level of awareness about opportunities surrounding you and make sure that you communicate about those in a clear (cf. 3️⃣ clarities) and timely manner. All it takes is a nudge in the CRM to get things started.
Grow our competencies
We encourage you to never stop learning. That includes learning from your peers.
We are building the Agilytic Academy and the Agilytic Lab to foster the exchange of ideas, no matter how experimental.
One of the best ways to learn is to teach, so we also encourage you to structure what you have learned and share with whoever might benefit from it.