Project Drivers - Distributed Ownership

So far I discussed what in my experience is (1) a good approach to software engineering projects (Ready, Learn, Do) and (2) how to adapt roadmap planning to leverage the experience of all members of your team. What I think is still missing is a discussion about responsibilities. Who is driving the Ready, Learn, Do process for a pitch we committed to? The answer to this question is part of this post.

watercolor drawing: senior people in a team are often bottlenecks

In my experience, the higher the risk the higher the seniority to own a project. While that makes sense in general it led to situations where more junior members of a team were starved out of the opportunity to learn and grow. Being responsible for something that is above your comfort zone is what pushes you to the next level.

There is also the bus factor. If larger or risky projects stay with a few senior people a lot of the highly critical work is dependent on them. If they are unavailable, the team starts to scramble to pick up those tasks. In the end, we siloed a lot of knowledge and experience into a few members which in my experience never ended well for the team.

watercolor drawing: instead you can also distribute some of the responsibility across the team

But I think it is an issue that is rather easy to fix. We already opened up roadmap planning to all members, so why not do the same for project lead responsibilities? I pitch an idea that is above my comfort zone but believe I can do it and so do other senior members of the team. In that case, I become the Driver and take on ownership(E1).

Responsibilities

But what responsibilities come with that role? It is not about building everything on your own, but it is about making sure we successfully iterate through the remaining steps of Ready, Learn, Do. That means a Driver makes sure:

stakeholder communication happens,
reports about the state of the project are shared regularly,
members of the project team know what to work on next,
that the project makes the expected progress,
that we do not get stuck while making decisions (tiebreaker)

The Driver is also the go-to person when people outside the project have a question. In short, they act as a leader.

Read on

Epilogue

(E1): The team and its leaders have to ensure a Driver is set up to succeed. If we agree I drive project X but they know I am not up to the task, even with their help, this will be a frustrating experience for all people involved.

You found a typo or some other mistake I made in this text? All articles can be changed here. If you want to exchange ideas then simply drop me a message at contact@paulheymann.de.