Team Leadership in self-organised teams

Team leadership in self-organised teams

In a typical self-organised team, Team leadership is not appreciated. However, there are going to be instances when you would need this capacity and have to understand how to appreciate and inculcate this important characteristic as well.

Some Context

I was working in a decent sized team that had crazy levels of client interactions. Our clients are working with a lot of variance in their business requirements and were rightly worried if we were designing the solution to be extensible and configurable.

The trouble came in the form of ambiguity in what is meant by having an extensible and configurable solution.

If we design for a fully extensible solution, that would take ages since we would keep every decision open in terms of design. That amount of engineering in terms of a solution design is not needed.

This meant that we had to make some calls on design that would balance extensibility and near term milestones for the product.

The challenge

The challenge came in terms of communicating the solution design to the client stakeholders. Not all the client stakeholders are technical and needed a language that is more product and business related.

However translating the technical solution challenges and the balancing that we did takes a lot of effort. In fact, it needs to be iterated till we arrive at the right level of abstraction and detailing.

This effort typically is not visible. The team ended up getting burnt out doing this kind of translation. There was constant struggle in the team on why we had to do this and what did we gain from expending so much effort that did not provide the development team any visible benefit.

The symptom

We had a milestone release and also discovered a new business case at the same time. We had to take a decision on what should be incorporated in our solution design. 

We went ahead with designing for our immediate milestone and taking up the tech debt on refactoring the solution design for the new business case later.

When the time came to refactor the solution design for the new business case, we figure out it will take 5 weeks and around 20 user stories to do that.

There was no way any of our developers could tell how these 20 stories were going to pan out in the 5 weeks. Our plans talked about having 4 stories every week. 

However , No plan survives when the rubber meets the road and that is exactly what happened.

We spent 4 weeks on the one important story - the one story that handled all the volatility in terms of refactoring and solution design. However, it turned into a nightmare in terms of client communication.

Most of our stakeholders were unable to comprehend on why we were behind the plan. The few stakeholders that were able to comprehend technology were under tremendous pressure to make sense of this mayhem and right the situation.

What turned out later is that we completed the one story in 4 weeks and the rest of the 19 stories in 1 week. Some of the obvious feedback we keep getting is that we should split our stories properly and we should communicate what really happened better.

However, in hindsight, what we really lacked is team leadership and focus on communication to the clients.

The real challenge

What we really lacked was focus on communication that could have saved us a lot of stress. It would have cost us a lot of time - however, if that is what our clients needed - We should have provided that and communicated the time taken to provide that.

Transparency and trust are very important - especially in a volatile and ambiguous environment. We do not make enough investments in a self-organised team to prioritise that.

A possible solution

One of the  possible solutions for this challenge is inculcating leadership in teams that can understand the problem, abstract it from things happening on the ground and be able to lead and provide the necessary clarity and buy-in from the stake holders.

All that would have taken in this specific situation was for us to slow down, provide clarity and then proceed to understand how we could have still met the deadline.

Thoughts?