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I think this is one of the arguments for holocracy. The entire purpose of management is to efficiently assign work to individual contributors. Instead of leavin

I think this is one of the arguments for holocracy. The entire purpose of management is to efficiently assign work to individual contributors. Instead of leaving a few work items unassigned, holocracy leaves all the work items unassigned, and then the ones that get done are the ones that are most important to the team. I'm not saying I buy the idea, and in fact that the same arguments against holocracy work against the author's approach. Instead, at the next department meeting, I talked about how impressed I was with what those teams had done, and how it was going to be important for us to spread that good practice to other teams. Without explicitly saying so, I let it be known that this was something people could work on. And what if nobody had stepped up? Would the author have left it at that, undermining their political power by showing that they could be ignored with no ill effects? Or would they have then appointed someone to force continuous integration upon everyone (thus creating resentment due to the false choice presented)? If you're going to manage, manage. If you're going to be hands-off, be hands-off. But this half-and-half nonsense combines the worst of holocracy and traditional management.

dmourati 11y ago
"And what if nobody had stepped up?" One option would be to pitch it again in a different method and at a later time. Iterate on approach and message. If it truly is an important project and if prospective volunteers had the time to commit, surely someone would emerge. Put another way, assignments represent opportunities.
- quanticle 11y ago
  >One option would be to pitch it again in a different method and at a later time. Right, but the fact that you pitched it once, and failed, undermines your credibility the next time you pitch the same idea. In the worst-case, you can get known as "that guy who is always advocating for <x>" and your interlocutor dismisses you even before taking the time to listen to your new argument.
transitorykris 11y ago
I wouldn't be concerned with work not getting done as long as you're thoughtful in where you leave the vacuums. The example he uses is a pretty good one. Teams were building software without the aid of CI, some teams had found benefit in it, but not yet all of the teams. You might be right, forcing CI may have created resentment, it might not have been the right thing to do at the time. If no one steps up, that's a signal worth thinking about.
YZF 11y ago
If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done in the first place. win-win as long as it's a learning experience for all involved. It's definitely a problem if you force a team or a person into a certain pattern and then change the rules without telling. For example you may have punished someone for taking the initiative in the past and now you try to intentionally create a vacuum. In the real world there is always vacuum and always stuff people think needs to get done that doesn't really need to get done. The illusion is that the manager is omnipotent and can see all the vacuum and inefficiency. A good manager works with the team to understand those.
- asgard1024 11y ago
  > If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done in the first place. Seriously? Consider this: You have all people tied up in work for one month. A customer issue comes up. Who should step up to take it? Because you're not seriously suggesting it should rot there one month, do you? It's a classical coordination problem (and that's why preemptive scheduling was invented). I, as a developer, have no idea if I should step up. I would have to asses importance of all the other work that is being done by others, just to get a boolean value out of it. So everybody has to switch context to examine the issue, and the everybody's tasks to see where it fits in the grand scheme of things. Now you can say, OK, we will have priorities on things, easy. But then you actually find out that the low priority work doesn't get done at all. OK, so you start to calculate time slices, fair scheduling, all that jazz. And all of sudden everybody is forced to execute these overcomplicated scheduling algorithms and no real work gets done. It's a bureaucratic nightmare (because people are really bad at executing algorithms correctly, and have high task switching overhead), and I have seen it. While this could be sanely done by a single responsible person, project manager, who has an idea about: (1) what is the priority (and required latency) of each work item (2) how long things are going to take (estimate) (3) what are the dependencies (4) who prefers what kind of work Furthermore, if he needs any help with these points, he doesn't need to ask the whole team. Only one person can assess importance of an issue; the others do not need to care.
  - YZF 11y ago

dmourati 11y ago

"And what if nobody had stepped up?" One option would be to pitch it again in a different method and at a later time. Iterate on approach and message. If it truly is an important project and if prospective volunteers had the time to commit, surely someone would emerge. Put another way, assignments represent opportunities.

quanticle 11y ago
>One option would be to pitch it again in a different method and at a later time. Right, but the fact that you pitched it once, and failed, undermines your credibility the next time you pitch the same idea. In the worst-case, you can get known as "that guy who is always advocating for <x>" and your interlocutor dismisses you even before taking the time to listen to your new argument.

transitorykris 11y ago

I wouldn't be concerned with work not getting done as long as you're thoughtful in where you leave the vacuums. The example he uses is a pretty good one. Teams were building software without the aid of CI, some teams had found benefit in it, but not yet all of the teams. You might be right, forcing CI may have created resentment, it might not have been the right thing to do at the time. If no one steps up, that's a signal worth thinking about.

YZF 11y ago

If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done in the first place. win-win as long as it's a learning experience for all involved. It's definitely a problem if you force a team or a person into a certain pattern and then change the rules without telling. For example you may have punished someone for taking the initiative in the past and now you try to intentionally create a vacuum. In the real world there is always vacuum and always stuff people think needs to get done that doesn't really need to get done. The illusion is that the manager is omnipotent and can see all the vacuum and inefficiency. A good manager works with the team to understand those.

asgard1024 11y ago
> If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done in the first place. Seriously? Consider this: You have all people tied up in work for one month. A customer issue comes up. Who should step up to take it? Because you're not seriously suggesting it should rot there one month, do you? It's a classical coordination problem (and that's why preemptive scheduling was invented). I, as a developer, have no idea if I should step up. I would have to asses importance of all the other work that is being done by others, just to get a boolean value out of it. So everybody has to switch context to examine the issue, and the everybody's tasks to see where it fits in the grand scheme of things. Now you can say, OK, we will have priorities on things, easy. But then you actually find out that the low priority work doesn't get done at all. OK, so you start to calculate time slices, fair scheduling, all that jazz. And all of sudden everybody is forced to execute these overcomplicated scheduling algorithms and no real work gets done. It's a bureaucratic nightmare (because people are really bad at executing algorithms correctly, and have high task switching overhead), and I have seen it. While this could be sanely done by a single responsible person, project manager, who has an idea about: (1) what is the priority (and required latency) of each work item (2) how long things are going to take (estimate) (3) what are the dependencies (4) who prefers what kind of work Furthermore, if he needs any help with these points, he doesn't need to ask the whole team. Only one person can assess importance of an issue; the others do not need to care.
- YZF 11y ago