Those Who Know Best asked me to train our Client Services folks on "my" application. Cross-pollination, to be sure--just more in the sense of folks in lab coats and latex gloves brushing pollen off carefully selected plant and brushing it on on an equally selected other plant.
But those were the extent of the specifications, leaving me to fill in the details. Which, naturally involved bribes with food, wine, chocolate, and randomly sorting the competing teams into their Hogwarts houses. That was to make up for the pre-class quiz that they were really good sports about. The first half assembled in the big conference room yesterday for the actual hands-on session.
No worries...I was ready with easily two hours of material to cover, during which Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, Slytherin and Gryffindor would take turns at the console doing actual client-type stuff on a test system. In my experience, that lends itself to questions far more than having features demonstrated to you.
What actually happened was that we quickly realized that the way they support the clients on their application is not at all how I support mine. Most notably, when there's a problem, I'm generally sticking my head straight head the database itself. Client Services, on the other hand, relies on the interface. Partly because those tools have been built for them all these years, and partly because some don't have the software nor a knowledge of SQL (Structured Query Language), much less any idea of how data fits together. Some, particularly the most senior folks do, and I had made the shaky assumption that those skills were acquired by the usual on-the-job organizational osmosis.
Wrong assumption, obviously. Which, for anyone presenting, just might trigger a freak-out because the agenda had suddenly evaporated. Which normally means pulling the plug on the whole thing or completely free-wheeling. Both are valuable meeting skills. But then the questions started flying thick as, for lack of a fresher phrase, two worlds collided.
And you know what? It was straight awesome. The balance of the two hours zipped by as I was grilled and in turn tried to get into their heads. Sure, occasionally we'd dip into the software to illustrate something. But for the most part it was meta-information: What the overall client relationships are like, some of the frustrations of working in a distributed development environment (instead of the one-stop-geek that is me), what the process is like on the client side. Those kinds of things.
I'd do it all over again...and I may just have that chance when I work with the second crew a week from tomorrow. I can only look forward to the instructive chaos that will bring.
