On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:45 PM, George Herbert <[email protected]> wrote: > Has this been an observed issue within the WMF?
In some areas. In my view, a well-functioning agile team is self-organizing and self-managed, and it's a manager's job to primarily set that team up for success, hire the right people, replace the people who aren't working out, and help escalate/resolve blocker or coordination issues outside the team's scope. Putting so much responsibility on the team's shoulders is in my opinion a good thing, because it treats them as adults accountable and responsible for the success or failure of their own work. Where we're trying to complete complex projects with a part of a person's time here, a part of a person's time over there, we lean heavily on managers to help with the resource scheduling and project organization, and that's where things are currently getting iffy at times. In our 2012-13 hiring plan submission, we're proposing a Dev-Ops Program Manager position to help with some of the particularly hairy cross-coordination of complex, under-resourced backend projects with operations implications (an example of that kind of project is the SWIFT media storage migration). There'll likely also be another layer of depth in the org chart as we grow and evolve further, but that's something to do very carefully because it increases real or perceived distance between people, and making people managers of 1-2 people is fairly inefficient. -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
