At the time, Sub-Team Leader Koji Kondo was in charge of organizing LU development. His tanned face left quite an impression when I first met him, but I also noticed something else. For some reason, his eyes almost looked sad. The reason became clear during my welcoming party in a conversation between the Department Manager, my supervisor at the affiliated company, and Koji.

The troubles of LU development

At the time, there were doubts inside the company concerning full commercialization of IP-PBX due to the technical difficulties. Persons responsible for development do not accept work in case commercialization of the product within the set deadline cannot be met or the quality cannot be guaranteed. Delay in delivery or quality issues will lead to the loss of trust from customers, let alone inconvenience to the Sales Department. In such cases, the period and method of commercialization are reviewed and a substitute plan for development that can be handled responsibly is created.

This is the stance necessary for the development administrator holding responsibility of QCD (Quality/Cost/Delivery), and accepting work haphazardly is simply irresponsible. The development of the line unit was an extremely risky development project since the critical VoIP-LSI component was not completed yet. To my surprise, I discovered that Koji was organizing the development under the guidance of the Department Manager since there was no team leader that would accept the job. I thought to myself, what did I get myself into?

Decision to become the LU development lead

But things were not all bad. Many of the engineers were young and motivated. There were 12 members in the team and half of them had been with the company for less than three years. Although it was my first time working with most of them, the workplace was filled with positive energy. Despite the lack of experience as a downside, their will to work was assuring. I also agreed to the Department Manager's belief of training new recruits with hands-on experience. In my past experiences, I have learned that in the end, the passion and motivation of the members, and the will to achieve something regardless of one's skills are the most important.

I communicated constantly with the members of the development team. My philosophy is that you must first gain understanding of the others before you can set a capable goal in order to produce results within a limited time. You must work from an equal perspective. If you look from the viewpoint of a supervisor, there is no output toward the expectations. If you look from the viewpoint of a subordinate, you are caught in a dilemma of results not being approved no matter how hard you try.

I myself experienced efforts not bearing fruit and I have seen the same occur to many others. And I wanted to avoid such a needless situation. Although I may not completely understand the feelings of members, I decided to thoroughly communicate with them. I especially remember talking with Koji during late hours, sometimes lasting until dawn.

The reaction I felt was assuring that despite the difficulties, these members could accomplish the goal. The main reason was the positive attitude of the team toward work and the feelings of unity. As issues of IP-PBX, I believed the LU accommodating conventional line interface was technically the most difficult though there still was the development of component parts such as the CCU, LSW and IP-TEL. I was stimulated by the challenge of this technical difficulty. That was when I decided to take the lead for the LU development of IP-PBX.