Recently I had the "pleasure" to work on something I've never worked on before. An organisation next door came asking for help. They wanted us to donate engineers helping them testing our code running in their binary. They were carrying out a huge architecture change, and would like to make sure the refactor does not break any of our code. The code of interest is developed by a dozen teams in my organisation. Due to the large number of teams involved, a coordinator was direly needed. That is why I was assigned the task to "drive" this project which nobody wants to.
It sounds like a project manager's job, and a large part of it actually is. One big aspect of the job is to keep every team, manager, director and participating engineer on the same page, via weekly email updates.
I had no idea how to write emails like these. Quite the opposite, my manager is a veteran in "driving organisational changes", and knows everything about it. Here is a list of principles I summarised, after going through rounds and rounds of revisions with my manager.
- Communication is a must.
- Always provide a TL;DR.
- Communications must be super positive, 100% of the time.
- When communicating a problem, always accompany it with a solution.
- Always make it clear whether you need help or not (hint: you don't), like put literal words "everything is on track" in your email.
- Always provide an estimate (ETA), so that people know you are in total control.
- Everybody must be in agreement. If not, reach an agreement before communicating.
Among these principles buried a deep fear of looking weak ("needing help"), a fear of losing control ("no estimate?", "people disagree?"), and a fear of upper management intervention. It makes me feel like we are in the military. In a war, asking for help is a serious matter, like requesting reinforcement. If your request is not granted, everybody in your unit dies and your side loses. It is understandable why people avoid asking for help at all costs. I cannot say how much of that applies to civil matters. One thing I do agree with is that upper management intervention is often a recipe for disaster, especially in a civil context.
UPDATE: If we look at each principle individually, 1, 2 & 7 are good general advice; 4, 5 & 6 are hedges against a weakness of humanity (the urge to micro-manage); 3 is a hedge against the dark side of humanity. The larger an organisation, the darker the humanity.
My original assumption towards "asking for help", is that if I'm not explicitly asking for help, then I don't need help. That is clearly not what the list above implies.
A few more random things that I learnt.
- Recognise stupidity and point it out bravely.
- Getting the other organisation involved is a great way to persuade people in your own organisation.
- Own things you are not obligated to own. Tell other people what to do even if it is not your project.
- Don’t take action items from people who don’t know what they are talking about. Persuade them and tell them how things work instead. This is called influencing.
- A good strategy to be persuasive is to pretend to be very very confident when talking.
- When answering questions from important people, first try to understand why they ask the question, and what they are going to do with the answer.
- Tell your manager what to do, and how they can help.
I cannot say that I agree with all of them. As someone who is also struggling at "developing" your career, you might find some of the principles useful. For me, deep down I prefer to stay true and keep it simple.