Why Does the One-Size-Fits-All Approach Fail in IT? | Bartosz Śliwa | Euvic Talks

Klaudia: Welcome to another episode of the podcast where we connect technology with business. If you are wondering where our host is today, he is sitting right across from me. My guest today is Bartek Śliwa. Hi, Bartek.

Bartek: Hi. Now I feel a bit awkward because you sound much more professional than I usually do.

Klaudia: Our viewers know you as the host of this podcast. Tell us, what do you do and what connects you with business?

Bartek: There is a multitude of initiatives, and it all probably started with IT because, as we know, IT had its Eldorado, so I took advantage of it too. Based on my IT career, and always having that commercial streak, I wondered how I could multiply my assets. At some point, I ran my own programming school for children. Currently, I own a tea and chocolate shop in Gliwice, and I’m somewhat interested in various types of investments. In Euvic itself, my path has been quite winding because I came here probably 12 years ago as an intern. They won’t fire me for it now, but back then I didn’t know anything, and they thought I did, though I quickly made up for my shortcomings. There was a turning point that made me start shaping my career path a bit differently. Namely, because I worked on several different products, I had several different supervisors. And quite immodestly, being just a junior back then, I concluded that they were doing it wrong. They didn’t know how to manage, and there had to be a better way. And that… that pushed me onto the path of agile management, which I live with to this day.

Klaudia: What does your work look like?

Bartek: What does our work look like? Unlike many companies or units that I encounter, we don’t work for the client, we work with the client. And always, when starting a new collaboration, I put a strong emphasis on making it clear that we won’t build this product or this… initiative without the client. If we do it alone, it won’t be what the client actually needs. I try to define, and even persuade the client who comes to us, what their responsibilities are and how we should cooperate to deliver value to their clients or their employees – depending on what kind of digital solution we are building. So, having those foundations in place, we look at the problem the client comes to us with, and we provide the best people to solve it.

Klaudia: Okay, so I understand that you come to a company and get familiar with it, or the client comes to you and gets familiar with how it all looks, and in what way do you question the current state of the company?

Bartek: Building digital products is one thing – that is rather a repeatable process where the client has their requirements, we ask questions, get answers, prepare an estimate, and so on. And that is, let’s say, the less complicated… less complicated matter at the start. Questioning the current state is usually related to process optimization within the client’s company. Whether it’s in the software development process itself – meaning we look at this “factory” producing a digital product – or within the organization itself, we check if those processes are optimal. However, I try to inspire them to question things rather than coming in and ruthlessly questioning everything myself, because it’s easy to come in and say: “This, this, this, and this isn’t working” and try to sell your services. But I think that’s an unreliable path. Instead, the client, knowing what hurts them, what falls short, and which indicators are not met, can look at those processes together with us while sharing their knowledge. And we, having the advantage of experience from many companies for which we have already delivered solutions – thanks to which we’ve learned how various organizations, hundreds of organizations in my case, look from the inside and how they work – I am able, based on that and my experience, to help improve these processes so that value arrives faster, on time, and at an optimal cost.

Klaudia: How do you do that? Are there any specific tools you use?

Bartek: Very often I start with employee interviews. If we are talking about process improvement, of course, because I know even from my own experience that sometimes, being a leader of a team of over a hundred people, some comments can be taken personally by me, despite having over a dozen years of experience. And sometimes you need that outside perspective. Simply someone saying: “Look, man, don’t get upset, but this is the perception out there. The fact that you’re trying to sell something else or see it differently is one thing, but how people perceive it is a completely different… different matter.” So these interviews and conversations, which ideally should take place in full honesty and transparency, are the knowledge base we build – whether it’s me or me and the colleagues I look at those processes with. And based on that, we can already give certain recommendations. Often they are accurate recommendations, but often we also don’t know the other side, right? Meaning, to put it bluntly, the “top” of the company, which has its own perspective. But that, again, allows us to identify where the breakdown in information flow between these two levels is, and we have certain… certain ways to unblock that communication.

Klaudia: Right, should a client prepare somehow for such a meeting? Meaning, should they bring some concrete statistics to you, or does it all just come out in the wash?

Bartek: When starting such a process improvement journey, it’s worth it for the client to know what they think isn’t working, just to try and anchor us in their reality. However, when it comes to the actual conversations, there shouldn’t be any preparation because even though we listen to the problem and get a sense of it – that’s one thing. We don’t bind ourselves to it at the end of the day; we try to have our own perspective, connect the dots ourselves, and by listening to many people in the organization, build a more complete picture. Because it’s a very simple matter – psychological aspects block some people from going to someone who is responsible for their raises and reporting a problem. Because that person might get upset: “What do you mean you’re coming with this problem? It might even be within your scope of duties to figure it out.” And that person might see it completely differently, right? So building that picture is one thing. I wouldn’t say you need to prepare super hard for it because we also often surprise people with our questions during these interviews, and you can see that these people are… we don’t come in like an auditing firm with a predefined set of questions just taking notes, or sending out surveys asking to send back responses. Instead, we lead a dialogue. And these dialogues vary in length depending on who has what to say and how talkative they are. And I think that preparation could actually hinder getting that close-to-the-truth, real picture here.

Klaudia: Okay, it’s often hard to change such deeply rooted patterns. So are there actually challenges at the employee level too, where people, for example, leave the company because they aren’t ready for it?

Bartek: Yes, I’ll use an analogy, maybe even referring to why that outside perspective is important. Let’s imagine the story of cooking broth (rosół). A husband comes home, he wants to cook his wife… well, the best broth he knows, his mother’s recipe. He cuts the chicken in half, puts it into two pots, and cooks it, right? And the wife comes in and says: “Well, it’s delicious, but why did you make it in two pots?” “My mom always did it that way, and it’s the best,” right? Well, since the couple is inquisitive, they go to his mom. “Mom, why always cut the chicken into two pots for the broth?” “I don’t know, my mom did it that way and it was always the best,” right? Again, they don’t get an answer, so they go to the grandmother. “Grandma, why do you always cook the chicken in two pots?” “Because I don’t have one big pot.” And very often it’s the case that if an outsider doesn’t come in, employees in a given organization become so immersed in the processes that they stop questioning them. And they don’t even think about whether it can be done better, more optimally, more cost-effectively, but rather: “That’s just how we do things in this company,” and that’s one aspect. Answering your question about whether this has its… to put it bluntly, casualties in terms of people – I would say 100% yes. There is always someone who won’t like the change because, for some, change will generate a promotion because they will get a more decisive position. For instance, if decision-making about a built product used to rest with 10 people in a given organization, and now it will rest with one who sets the rhythm for the remaining nine. That one person gets promoted, while the other nine retain their positions or feel demoted: “Well, now we are under someone.” And that inherently implies that some people will love the change, while others will say: “Okay, my workplace here is done, I’m leaving, I don’t like this.” Change itself also generates a lot of fear; those are, again, psychological mechanisms. Quite often, when our arrival at an organization that asks us for help is poorly communicated, before we even manage to do anything, we already know there are 10 resignation letters on the desk. So again – it’s not a simple process, but at the end of the day, it always bears fruit, so the risk is worth taking.

Klaudia: Right, so is there anything that can be done to avoid this? To prepare the employees a bit and minimize this resistance to change?

Bartek: I’ll state a truism, but communication. Without building an atmosphere of psychological safety by People Managers, regardless of any departments, it simply won’t succeed. It might succeed, but the risk of losing key, often really good… good people is increased. So to minimize that risk, you need to communicate the process. Ideally, you need to engage people in that process so that they also feel they have an impact on what is happening around them. Because at the end of the day, that’s exactly what we do – we listen to these people, we help solve their problems. And excluding them from it and making decisions often without the people whom a given improvement is supposed to affect… well, we are just asking for trouble.

Klaudia: Apart from issues regarding employee engagement and the organizational culture, are there any other challenges that you encounter?

Bartek: Yes, referring to what I said – across various organizations, I have definitely delivered software, directly and indirectly, for over 100 clients. My colleagues with whom we improve processes also have their own experiences. Very often we enter what is called the downstream. Downstream is where the software is actually manufactured. And again, we can have a very cool product company, giants… I’m just throwing names because I worked there, so these are just examples like Allegro or… or Empik. And they seem like a super-functioning organization – maybe they are, or maybe often these organizations, because they build one product, see one organism and lack those other 99 perspectives that we have. We are able to glance at their product development processes (I’m talking particularly about product companies) and simply optimize that process. This affects the speed of delivery, the ability to implement changes, and more cost-optimal decision-making. Making decisions based on data – everyone collects data nowadays, but barely anyone knows how to use it. We are able to capture all the key metrics and show what to do with them. So that is also the area where our help is mainly sought. And we very often expand beyond it because manufacturing software is one thing – that’s just the factory, that’s just the work. But software isn’t built in isolation from requirements, and requirements are gathered in the so-called upstream, meaning at the top of the stream. And again, that is another area where we can help – meaning an ideation phase, processing data, conducting interviews with end-users, and so on, and so forth. Gathering all these elements, a person responsible for a given product, having that top of the stream well-optimized, is able to make good decisions and deliver value to the organization’s clients.

Klaudia: Referencing how this process actually looks – meaning, are there any particular methods you use during such visualization and subsequent optimization of these processes?

Bartek: Yes, there isn’t one single solution here because the scale of the solution being built implies the method or approach we choose. However, we always try to start from that entire stream where we have ideation, then we have that “factory”, capture how it looks now, listen to the client, and also advise a bit on how it should look or how it could look. And only having that current and target stream, we think about how to reach that target image using small steps. Very often we have a sort of utopia in our heads that we would like to strive for, but we know it’s unachievable, so we also set some intermediate steps. And quite often, at step two, three, or even step one, the organization stops and says: “Damn, this has already helped us so much that we don’t need to invest more money into improvements.” So that’s our approach in a nutshell. I am obviously also a proponent of continuous improvement – there should always be that feedback loop, we should look and question whether we aren’t cooking that chicken in two separate pots because maybe we just lack that one big pot. And… and that is the culture, that mindset shift that we try to pass on during our work, very often with a positive outcome.

Klaudia: Is there a universal approach – “two pots” to make it turn out well?

Bartek: If someone is selling a universal approach, I wouldn’t buy anything from them. I believe there is no universal approach because the development environment, especially in the area of software development, is a complex domain. If we operate in a complex domain, we should do short iterations, form hypotheses, and validate those hypotheses to see if they worked. It’s like if we wanted to get from the bottom of a page to the top – it won’t be a straight line, it will always meander a bit. But that’s roughly how it looks. Sometimes you have to turn back, make a pivot. And I am far from formulating hypotheses like: “Yes, if you choose this solution, dear client, which we recommend to you, you won’t have to change anything anymore, everything will be… well, your organization will be the leader in everything.” No, that’s not true, that never works. You have to constantly work on it.

Klaudia: Okay. We also often hear that less is more, in the context of tasks. My question here is: can you share some examples of how to actually work smart, not hard, and minimize such multi-threading? Because I suspect there are a lot of these activities.

Bartek: Yes. Let’s imagine you have to chop wood, mow the lawn, and bring water from the well. You can either do them one after another according to priorities, or do everything piece by piece. At the end of the day, finishing one thing, starting the second, finishing the second, starting the third, and finishing that third one will bring more value than doing everything at once. And translating that to the software development world, there is a concept of limiting work in progress (WIP), and that’s roughly the same case, just regarding the development of functionalities in software. Because sure, we can work in parallel – let’s take a simple example of an e-commerce store working on the shopping cart, registration, and marketing offers. If those are separate teams, then cool, that can still be scaled, but if the same group of people is supposed to do it, then if they do all three things at once, all three will arrive later, right? And first – they will arrive later because we start at the same time and finish at the same time (obviously vastly simplifying). But second – there’s also context switching, which clearly shows that having just two contexts and switching from one to the other, we already lose 20% of our time. The more of these context switches between different threads, the more that efficiency drops. When you have five contexts, only about 10% of our time is actual work – 90% of the time is lost on context switching. So that’s the idea of working smart, not hard. I know everything is important right now, I know I have 17 stakeholders right now and they all want to get their piece of the pie. But that’s exactly where prioritization comes in, dealing with things that are urgent and important now, while the rest can wait. Perhaps it will never even get our attention, as new requirements might come in that are higher priority.

Klaudia: We live a bit in the era of AI and automated solutions now, so the question here is: what does the issue of automation look like then? Can’t we actually just automate some processes, and are there tools we can use to do it smoothly and quickly?

Bartek: We can. We can automate it. I am actually a fan of automating all spheres of my life and it’s worth looking for repetitive, yet complicated tasks that we perform because those are exactly the areas where AI is worth applying. Not to operate on difficult examples, but from my own life: every month, as the CEO of a LLC – a small one, because it’s small, that’s why I do it personally – I used to check if I had all the invoices that corresponded to transactions on my bank statement. And I won’t hide it, it took a few hours during the month. A simple AI script was enough, which checks each invoice one by one, extracts the amount, extracts the contractor, and maps it to my statement. And every month… every single month I saved a few hours of work. And those are exactly the types of areas we should look for in our organizations, where… where AI can give us huge value, free up our time, but also free up employees’ time. It allows them to work in other areas. A more complicated example: some issues with loading various elements onto… onto trucks, onto trailers. In some companies, there are dedicated planners for this, often it’s a dozen or several dozen full-time jobs. If you talked to them, it’s a series of rules they follow, which can be taught to artificial intelligence. And thereby, these people with their domain, expert knowledge can serve the organization elsewhere, and their all-day planning can be replaced by a piece of software.

Klaudia: Okay, do you have any examples of such cooperation where you actually implemented an optimization that was successful, that improved the company’s operation in this approach? Besides, you took part – Bartek, who has a ton of these implementations under his belt, right? If you could share some of the most interesting ones…

Bartek: The most interesting… I’d like to refer to the most sexy one. The most sexy one was detecting pancreatic cancer based on blood platelets. We deployed artificial intelligence there – it was a Swedish startup, yes. And that was a project where the work really gave you that great feeling that… that we are doing something good for the world. So that artificial intelligence – unfortunately I cannot disclose details – but it examined those… those blood samples and with a really high probability was able to assess whether a given patient was at risk of pancreatic cancer or not. So that is a value that is not only business-oriented but also social, which came out of this.

Klaudia: Alright, Bartek, a final question that is characteristic, and actually authored by you: what has inspired you recently?

Bartek: Maybe it wasn’t just recently, and it… it is also a process, but less than two years ago I started… Overwhelmed by the fact that… that I used to program, my brain was working, I caught myself thinking that now I don’t program, I’m no longer doing that “honest work”, my brain actually stopped working, or at least it doesn’t work at the RPMs I would want it to work at. And I concluded: “Hey, I used to like learning languages, let’s polish my English, let’s try Spanish.” I didn’t know yet what kind of effects it would have on me, and the effects turned out to be very positive. From the simplest ones, like: switching… some phone call to Spanish resulted in the fact that while being in Salzburg in a Spanish restaurant, the lady was so happy that I got a beer for free. To also a fuller absorption of travels. I really like, when traveling, talking to locals. While if I fly to the British Isles… okay, I might not get along with the Scots that well, but when I am in England – I’ll talk. On the other hand, by learning Spanish, that whole Spanish-speaking world opened up for me, quite apart from… from Spain itself. Well, recently I had the pleasure to fly to Cuba with a few friends and… and talk to the locals there. In fact, I was the translator for the whole five of us, so it seems to me that polishing foreign languages supports the thesis that says travel broadens the mind, because… because that language allows you to absorb that culture and those customs fully. And I think that’s what has had the biggest, most positive impact on me recently.

Klaudia: Do you feel those cultural differences that help you better understand clients later on, and your employees? Just getting familiar with those differences, how people act, how they function?

Bartek: I’m not convinced if I “feel” them, although there is definitely one positive change from it – I don’t negate… I don’t negate the other side’s way of thinking. Because earlier, when my horizons maybe weren’t as wide as they are today, it happened to me that, not understanding the other side’s perspective, I would close myself off to it. Learning about other cultures, being in… in a different environment, with other nationalities has definitely helped me change my thinking more towards: “Oh, that’s interesting. I don’t understand, but I want to understand why you just said what you said, or thought what you thought, or where your decision came from.” And all that in Spanish, not only, because it’s known that English is that global language anyway. So quite often, when I fly to another country, I’ll talk to an Italian in English too, he’ll answer in Italian-English and we’ll understand each other. Very often some interesting conversations come out of it. I remember a situation right when the war between Russia and Ukraine broke out – I happened to be in Cyprus and we met in a pub with a guy from Egypt, a Cypriot, two Poles, someone else… And that incredibly broadens your horizons, because you often meet people from countries, let’s call them exotic, who have a completely different look at… at things that we look at in our own way. And such an exchange of experiences, I think, opens a person up more.

Klaudia: Great, if our listeners wanted to contact you – whether regarding optimization or… or also regarding traveling to Spain – I understand they can visit you and come for… for a coffee or some chocolate?

Bartek: They can come for a coffee, for chocolate, they can also hit me up on LinkedIn. But right away, please don’t get upset if I take a long time to reply, because it varies. But generally, I am very happy to establish new relationships. Sometimes nothing comes out of it, and sometimes cool, long-term acquaintances come out of it, which bear fruit for both sides, I think. So, you’re welcome to.

Klaudia: Super. What does it feel like to sit on the other side of the microphone?

Bartek: Well, relaxed. I… we haven’t said this yet, but I have a musical background, so being on… on the other side of the microphone has often happened to me before. Yes… yes, a man of many talents.

Klaudia: Bartek, thank you very much for participating. I also thank our listeners and see you in the next episode.

Bartek: Thanks.