Midwest IT Survival

I think it is safe to say that anytime any company wants to get something new accomplished they “kick off” this thing called a “project”.  Now if you have spent any time in IT you have probably had a role on one of these so called projects.  You know when you are on a good project:

• Everyone knows what the end goal is.
• Everyone knows each others roles.
• Everyone has a sense that all participants are accountable for their tasks.
• Things are getting done.
• Everyone feels a sense of progress.
• Everyone feels a sense of team.

You also know when you are on a bad project:

• Everyone is seemingly bumping into each other.
• No one can really articulate the goal of the project
• No one knows what the end state is supposed to look like.
• Time is going by with meetings and minutes and status reports but no real tangible work is getting done.

This series of articles will cover different aspects on how to survive as an engineer that has a role to play on an IT project.  The previous article can be found here.

How to survive with too many chiefs or too many indians

First and foremost, make sure your role is clear on the project.  Make sure at all times you are executing the functions associated with your role.  If you are unsure if your role requires you to perform a certain function, ask around to confirm and if you aren’t getting concrete yes or no answers, confirm with your boss.  It might seem like you are annoying or bothering your boss but believe me, your boss would rather answer a 30 second role clarification question than sit in hours of meetings dancing around why someone on his team did or didn’t do a particular function on a project.

Second, if you have opportunity or are asked to perform a function outside the bounds of your role, consider all the angles before just up and completing the function.  It might seem cool to build the widget that connects the two systems together to allow the transactions to flow, but if that is not your explicit role, you might be putting your boss and your team in jeopardy.  How so?  Well, if you team is a support rather than a development group in the organization, you have just forced your boss to have more ownership in the system than he has been charged to have.  Your boss will be in political hot water when you are pulled back into the project make changes to the widget while other systems your boss is responsible for need coverage and you can’t be in both places at once.  The last thing you want to be doing is creating a headache for your boss when your boss has the most direct influence on your job duties and compensation.

Not all functions outside of your role are filled with danger.  Some are filled with opportunity for praise for helping the project move forward.  In the example above, there may not be a role that is supposed to build this widget.  Maybe the project is plugging all the technology together in order to test the final solution and someone didn’t realize these two systems needed a widget.  You could be the engineer that saves the proverbial day.  When everyone is patting each others backs when the project is successfully implemented and everyone is overly positive, someone could exclaim: “Wow, glad Bob pulled the widget out of his ear at the last moment, we thought we had a big delay on our hands!”  Yes, these moments are few and far between, but they do exist, they are fleeting, so enjoy them for the brief moment they do exist.  The key to pulling this off successfully, starting even before building a working widget, is to make 110% sure your boss is completely onboard with what you are proposing to do outside your role and the risks associated.  Be prepared for your boss to agree that you are completely capable of building the miracle widget, but because of company politics that if you tried to put them together in your mind would make you pass out, he asks you not to build the widget.  Don’t get discouraged if this happens.  There will be many projects and many opportunities to stretch your role and position yourself for exceeding expectations.  Learn from these rejections on how to better sell your boss on your ideas for the future.

In the next part of the series I’ll continue cover how to survive with too many chiefs or too many indians with one of the most powerful tools the “pre-task”.

Related posts:

1. How to Survive Your Role on a Project as an Engineer, Part 1
2. How to Survive Your Role on a Project as an Engineer, Part 2
3. How to Survive Your Role on a Project as a Manager, Part 2
4. How to Survive Your Role on a Project as a Manager, Part 3
5. How to Survive Your Role on a Project as a Manager, Part 1