Quality

Living the value

Design

Caring about every aspect of design that you showcase to clients and what is put out in the world for people to use. This means making sure elements are aligned and consistent, that there’s no spelling/grammar errors in your work and that you’ve explored various options to get to your final product.
Making sure that your design files are neat and structured in a way for other designers to understand the work.
Quality is not only caring about the design, but how you interact with clients and the people you work with. It’s about delivering a quality experience when engaging with people. It’s about presenting yourself with quality as well.
Understanding your craft. This means using principles of familiarity to ensure a quality experience (i.e. understanding interface guidelines).
Making sure your timesheets are submitted on time, to the correct projects and without errors.

Engineering

Providing accurate and correct information dealing with your team and stakeholders. Company decisions and product features live and die by technical input. Double-check and triple-check. Build prototypes and experiments if needed.
Done is done. You can’t throw your code over the fence to the next person in line. Make sure that you’ve tested and measured with everything you have possible. Verify your work with tests, and measure for performance where appropriate. When something is done it doesn’t mean you won’t come back to it, but when you do it’ll be as new work.
Quality is an important trait of feedback. Ensure that you provide useful, kind, and helpful feedback. Be verbose, and provide enough context for the receiver to safely interpret what you want to carry across. Don’t be ambiguous and don’t leave room for interpretation.
Optimising your code for human readability.
Considering the domain you are operating in, and optimise for it. It is not expected of you to agree with other teams, clients and projects’ ways of working, but it is expected to deliver quality work in the way that they expect it. Be careful not to let personal opinion trump your ability to contribute.
Automating tasks that are repetitive and prone to human error. No one needs to argue over whitespace. It detracts from the important discussions and ultimately wastes time.
Striving to write code that is optimal and flexible, while avoiding over-engineering. This is a fine balance to strike, but it is often safer to work with what you know than to anticipate the world.
Mastering your tools and optimise your work environment. This will remove unnecessary hindrances and allow you to give full attention to the code.
Finding people to look up to, learn from them, understand why they do things, and assimilate that information into your own craft.
Considering your work up front in terms of architecture and dependencies. Often it is hard to change some code later. Consider its lifetime and public visibility.
Having strong beliefs, but be willing to find flexible points to achieve the desired outcome. This often means sacrifices and the willingness to live with uncomfortable tension. Perfect code with a perfect architecture that isn’t in a user’s hands is worthless. This is no excuse to cut corners - you have to identify in which areas “good enough” is good enough.
Processes and principles are there to serve us, not the other way around. If something doesn’t work, and leads to poor quality of work, feedback, output or otherwise, regroup and rework the principle/process. We should believe strongly, but be willing to let go for improvement.

Projects

Providing accurate and correct information to your team and your stakeholders. Maintaining the right kind of documentation or communication to achieve this purpose.
Caring about the quality of the end product you and your team produce – i.e. understanding defect rate and which items to prioritise first; working with the client to steer them to choose the options that will produce a great user experience or helping them make the best possible trade-offs, when necessary; knowing which requirements are the most important or relevant to solve the overall problem or challenge and maintaining focus on them.
Making progress visible to your clients in a way that is clear and useful (so they can mitigate or take corrective actions if needed) using roadmaps, progress charts, risk registers and documentation specifically relevant to the context. Find ways to draw their attention to the key issues or items in these artefacts. Provide the client with options when you have arrived at a challenge, rather than making them feel alone in dealing with a problem.
Being clear and articulate in your communication, with client and your teams. Keep seeking shared understanding by asking others if they feel you understand what they have told you, or asking someone else to tell you what they understand from you. Take the time to understand before you speak or continue. As the glue of the team, your understanding of the situation is critically important to everyone, as misunderstandings will be communicated from you to everyone else. Take the time to review your own understandings and question yourself.

Sales & Marketing

Dressing appropriately when engaging with potential clients. Neat. Clean. Proud.
Showing pride in the Glucode brand, your interaction with the potential client will probably be his first experience with Glucode.
You should be able to provide a deeper level of understanding around what we do and why we do it, assume that the client went through the website with a comb, you should be able to provide additional information to what’s on the website.
Always give the person a takeaway in your first meeting, something where you added a small bit of value to their current situation.
Send out additional research after the meeting.
Always be prepared.
If you make a promise, keep it.
Be 10 minutes early/ready for a meeting.
Speaking with authority, don’t always default to “I have to follow up with ….”.
Doing research about the company you will be meeting with prior to the meeting.

Support

Make sure that suitable, relevant and practical solutions are being implemented.
Pride yourself in clear and simple instructions, administration and communication and this is elevated by using software solutions such as BambooHR, Lattice, Sage and Harvest.
Catch anything that falls, and our ultimate goal is to not allow the ball to drop.
When any employee approaches us with a question, big or small, relevant or even a little irrelevant, it is our job to serve and help them find the answer. And, if we don’t know the answer, to find out, or, at the very least, point them in the right direction.
Being trustworthy and building relationships of trust with the team - not only with confidential information, but with the fact that they, their concerns and questions, are always treated as important.
Being reliable and consistent when it comes to following processes.
Being client focused (internally & externally); meet and exceed expectations.
Being disciplined when executing tasks.
Providing purpose and engaging with team members, clients and other stakeholders.
Involving coworkers which in turn will empower them and best potential will be unlocked.
Continually producing correct and analysed data in order to make evidence-based decisions.
Learning and continuous improvement to ensure standard of quality is consistent.