Leaders: Use Mini-Projects to Delegate Better
Everyone who has ever held a leadership position has been there: you’re overwhelmed, and things are starting to slip through the cracks. Some well-meaning observer tells you, “You have to delegate!”
“But it would take just as long to hand this off!” you cry. “And what if they don’t do it right?” What does it take to make delegation more trouble than it’s worth?
When a project team is starving for strategic capacity, the development team can suffer or find themselves in a holding pattern waiting for work to get defined. When the work is finally defined, it may be unclear or misunderstood. The tech lead struggles to define work or sinks many hours into research to define work to a “sprintable” level.
Alternatively, or even at the same time, your dev team may feel like they’re receiving marching orders that stifle their problem-solving ability or orders that don’t take full advantage of their domain knowledge. Symptoms of this (if the team doesn’t say as much directly) are that stories are frequently refactored to account for missed issues, acceptance criteria are updated mid-work, etc. Perhaps the dev team outgrew the need for detailed implementation hypotheses as they’ve leveled up or taken more ownership of their features.
With this technique, you can skip sinking many hours into researching and defining sprint-length stories. Instead, with mini-projects, you can distill the knowledge unique to your leadership position into a set of parameters and allow your team to flex their consulting skills.
