5 reasons to have someone leading a project
Without creating a knowledge silo and alienating your team
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There’s nothing more painful than starting a task, only to realize it’s blocked.
This happened to me last week.
We had discussed 2 options to release a feature. We agreed verbally on going with option A/. When I picked my task, I realized we had moved toward option B/. My task didn’t apply and we were missing some other tasks.
There are a lot of decisions made in the middle of projects.
It’s not enough to write a technical design and align it at the beginning.
The project needs a dedicated Point Of Contact (POC).
In this post, we’ll see how to have a POC for your projects to ensure a smooth delivery
Reasons to have a well-defined POC
Project planning and coordination
A designated POC can start communication with dependencies from the beginning.
If you push this to a task in the sprint, once the conversation starts it will block the task until finished. Instead, parallelize async communication by starting them early on.
This POC will also have the big picture of the timeline.
The other engineers are busy getting the context of each project to deliver their tasks. They can’t consider all the tasks in the backlog of this project.
With a designated POC, this engineer will realize if we are missing tasks. The POC will estimate the timeline and will track progress to ensure delivery on time.
Technical direction
The POC ends up being usually the person who designs the technical solution.
Every project needs someone to put a technical proposal that others can review. Otherwise, the result is a Frankenstein of a project. Everybody did what they saw best in the narrow focus of their task.
Reviewing code and proposals is a shared responsibility of the team. But it’s a single person’s responsibility to take the lead in writing an initial proposal.
Risk management
A designated POC can flag risks because they have the big picture.
Otherwise, you’d just find out that you didn’t meet your timeline. You’d just find out that something broke in production on an edge case.
It’s not only about preventing that from happening. It’s about identifying that it’s a risk and making a well-informed decision