Living Up to Our Values (Part 1)
Living Up to Our Company Values (Part 1): Make it Better Than you Found It
Values in any organization help define and guide “how things get done” in that organization. It’s part of the culture, it’s soft and squishy. It’s hard to quantify but it’s there, visible through not only words but actions, and affects how the organizations execute. Values provide acceptable norms in an organization when things are not clearly fitting in a perfect square box – and in the line of our business, often times there are multiple answers to complex multi-faceted business problems. There is no clear right or wrong. No clear, one path or one solution. I believe values to be just as important if not more important than process or technology, because they’re a very strong invisible arm that permeates the organization’s mindset.
When we started our company rebranding exercise early last year we took a multi-quarter journey to look at our people, what we value and how those values manifest in tangible actions. This is not simply a “value poster” posted near our office restroom that nobody pays attention to. We actually don’t print out a value posters because the values live in our hearts, minds, and actions – not on a poster.
That being said, I’d like to formally re-introduce our values in this 4-part blog series – through a few real-life Cprime stories. Because we do have a bias-toward-action value.
Value
Value. Make it better than you found it. No matter what. When our people face challenges or problems – our CEO loves to say, “let’s turn problems into opportunities”. Value can come in many forms. For example, we encourage continuous learning (another value) because through learning we are providing value to ourselves, to our clients, and to our organization.
Want to give back to our agile or DevOps community and deliver community value? We’ll gladly sponsor conference talks, thought leadership, and in-house development of new solutions to unique client business problems, ahem, opportunities.
In the last four years at Cprime, I’ve seen us triple our headcount and quadruple our revenue. The challenge with such intense scaling is that what we built in terms of process and technology might quickly break. What used to work for a regionalized team of 10 – won’t work for a nationwide team of 100. I’ve seen countless times how our operations and finance teams would develop a new process in Salesforce and in Jira, only to revisit and blow it up within 12-18 months! Now, that can be disheartening for some. All that hard work to develop, train, roll-out, and support a new process – only to see us outgrow it just as people started getting accustomed to it! But, interestingly the operations and finance teams keep at it. Sure, there may be some grumbling here and there. But in the end, they know that if we’re not continuously delivering value and making things better – then we’re not living up to our values. And so they’ll gladly start the process of re-engineering our internal processes and technologies. They listen to their internal customers and address their pain points with the “newish” process and re-jigging necessary to scale to a team of 500. Never sitting still – making it better than they found it.
