Nurturing Intellectual Capabilities

#61: Nurturing Intellectual Capabilities [Jul 2009]

An intellectual is one who has the power of understanding, has the capacity for the higher forms of knowledge or thought and characterized by intelligence or mental capacity. Suitable exercising of brain is essential for an intellect. As a Knowledge worker, all IT professionals have to be an intellect to survive, sustain and grow in the industry.

With technological changes happening too rapidly, intellects are challenged to keep pace with it. Knowledge workers are constantly challenged to learn newer technologies fast on one side, deliver projects on time & quality on the other hand. Doing both efficiently and effectively leaves the knowledge workers stressed out. Unless there is collaboration between like minded intellects, one cannot keep pace with the technology in the long run.

Cloud Computing is new a technology that we would like to learn. While the development would be interested to know how the design and architect would change to implement cloud computing, the testing team would want to learn as to how to evaluate the design and test the product and the operations team would like to learn deployment and managing challenges.

Hence, all the three teams can have an interest to build their knowledge on this. But the challenge is to learn in parallel to their current workload. If teams collaborate, the learning can happen in faster pace, also each team will have a different view point and hence the learning could be more effective.

Another example I could imagine is Orthogonal Testing technique. This technique will shorten the time-to-test curve dramatically without compromising on quality. But the technique requires understanding and use of statistics. It also requires usage of advanced functionalities XLS. Hence, QA team can collaborate with CAT team in order build their intellects as well as collaboratively learn.

Am I trying to convince you as to why I have named “Intellectual Groups” as next year theme which sits on top of Collaboration? Well, you guessed it right!!