harisrid Tech News

Hi all,

Today, I’ll review a challenging delegation scenario, where I coordinated multiple parties to tackle concurrent upcoming feature.

Situation

It was end of Q1 of 2024; Q2 was starting up, and my team and I finalized the delivery of the first phase of the Feedback loop project. The end-of-Q2 deadline to meet NYDFS compliance was fast coming up, and it entailed two major deliverables: scans & exports on historical data and automation scan work on incremental data. My team and I were struggling in making a concrete plan on how to tackle two concurrent feature demands.

My Task

My tasks, as a senior engineer, were laid out, crystal clear, in front of me. I had to chart out upcoming feature deliverables for the next couple of Sprints delegate the work to my team members. The delegation challenged me. For multiple reasons.

Firstly, I had to clean up our Team’s DevOps board ; I not only had to write up new user stories and tasks, but I also had to modify and clean up existing ones. I did this to avoid duplicate future work and to avoid confusing my co-workers.

Secondly, I usually operate at the high-level design of features – I’m not my other colleagues who’re deeper in the technical woods of the codebases. This level of operation made it harder to fully understand the scope and the complexity of items to delegate.

And thirdly, I had to delegate to team members with different backgrounds and experience levels. This added to the challenge, since I delegated to folks more experienced and less experienced than me. The skill of best positioning your resources and your people strategically is difficult.

Actions

So in order to write up the delegation, I took a series of actions.

My first action involved setting up dedicated one-on-one meetings with each member to understand what they’re currently working on and what they think they need to be working on.

Next, I created a summary-style bullet-point list identifying individual tasks and responsibilities for each party involved.

For my senior staff engineer, I recognized that his responsibility should be more advisory, so I tasked him to provide assistance with high-level design, ideation, and feedback on design documents.

For my junior engineer, I focused us on partitioning out individualized ownership of historical work and continuous work. He already came in with extensive background on historical scanning work, so I emphasized that he should prioritize wrapping up the coding, the testing, and the deployment for remaining databases before diving into automation can work.

And lastly, for me, a senior engineer, I thought focusing on design & development for the initial proof-of-concepts for automation work made the most sense. The feature was new, and we weren’t sure about what design mechanisms or technologies we’d use to handle the ambiguous requirements – requirements that I knew I’d have to clarify.

Result

In the end, I wrote up a clear delegation with delineated roles & responsibilities understood by all parties involved. I also coordinated with my team’s product owner by cleaning up our board – I re-wrote, deleted, and created new user stories. Doing so enabled me to shift my collaborators, my product owners, and my leadership into better roadmap alignment. We knew exactly what we needed to execute and what we needed to prioritize. Reflecting back, I can strongly see how the frontloaded delegation work positively shaped the team’s future to meeting its deliverables by the deadlines and avoid stepping over each other’s feet.