How I adjusted to a new learning experience
Recently, I was engaged in a change focused exercise which made me have a more adaptable approach to the things I do. Before I was invited to the Andela Bootcamp I was quite comfortable with my learning pace. Usually, I do not follow any rules, I do things the way I wanted. I believed I had enough time to achieve my goals. Surprisingly, during the Andela Bootcamp, I was able to cover so much within a short period. I notice Andelans have the Do It Now approach. They practically believe that, when a task or a set of task s is assigned to you, it should be done and submitted before the deadline. They believed that as one strives to meet up the submission deadline, one must also keep in mind that the deliveries should be of high quality and must satisfy the product owner expectations.
Meeting up with Submission deadline
This is one of the most challenging aspects of The Andela Bootcamp. The need to meet up with the submission deadline may be difficult, especially when there are so much to deliver. Usually, I would give my best to make the product owner happy. However, the product owner expects that the product should be available at a particular time. Late delivery of the product could give a negative impression to the product owner.
How did I respond to this challenge
Firstly, I utilized the agile and scrum methodology.
An Agile Method is an approach to project management that is utilized in software development. It uses incremental, iterative work sequences that are commonly known as sprints. It has 12 principles. I will like to mention two of them which are
1. Customer satisfaction
2. Adaptability to change requirement, even in late development
Scrum is a subset of Agile. Scrum follows a set of roles, responsibilities, and meetings that never change. For example, Scrum calls for four ceremonies that provide structure to each sprint: sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint demo, and sprint retrospective.
On the 20th of Monday 2019, I met with my LFA — Patrick Azu. He adviced, that going forward I should always create a task for each feature story in Project on Pivotal Tracker. I believe this practice could be called sprint planning. Also, I Posted Standups on a daily basis.
Working in a team
The peer learning phase of the Bootcamp was very interesting. Here, I was able to work in a team of 3. The project started off with a meeting. We discussed the goal of the project. We identified the strength of each development team member and assigned responsibilities accordingly. At first, it was not easy because we have different views of the project. With open mind and respect for each other, we were able to execute the project successfully.
What I have Learned and How to React to Change
I learned that I should always be prepared for change, especially when things don’t work according to plan. For example, in my frontend, I noticed some design flaws. Though I am not quite sure if it is a flaw or not. So I took a step and made research on good frontend design. Shortly, I got feedback from my LFA that I should make some modification. with an open mind, I received the feedback and finally, I made the change without any delay.
Obviously, the ideal way to deal with change is to be is proactive because you feel more in control. And the more we feel we have control over the situation, the less stress and frustration we feel