in reply to Re: Failure To Refactor
in thread Failure To Refactor

If you become the owner of one of these projects it is really important that you are free to choose who you have on your team. Ideally you want to keep the people who've been maintaining the code up to now, but if it becomes impossible to work with them then you must be able to either fire them (from the project) or be able to walk away yourself.

Walking away is a drastic option, no question, but there may come a point where continuing to work with a team you don't get on with is doing you far more harm than good.

Remember, if you're the Owner then you are responsible, do everything in your power to make sure that you deliver. And if you reach the point that you know you can't deliver, run, don't walk to your management and give them the bad news; putting it off will only make things worse. And if doing that loses you the job... well, if you can't change your organization, change your organization.

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Re: Becoming the Owner
by Rex(Wrecks) (Curate) on May 15, 2002 at 22:17 UTC
    "If you become the owner of one of these projects it is really important that you are free to choose who you have on your team."

    Update: Actually the above stament might be more true in smaller environments or startup situations. However I work for a large (50,000+ employees) company, and in my case it is very seldom that you get to pick and choose.

    In an Ideal World this may be true. Unfortunatly, in most cases you will be lucky to have input on who will be team members, let alone be able to choose. But you are right about one thing, you MUST have the authority to keep the group in line.

    And I also agree that management should be kept up to speed on progress, especially in the software world, where slipping dates has become the norm (and, no I don't like it anymore than anyone else).

    "Nothing is sure but death and taxes" I say combine the two and its death to all taxes!
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