Ear Infection and Dependency Management

Recently I had an infection on my external skin of the ear and I had to visit a skin specialist. After checking he started saying there is a skin infection but that is just a symptom and actual cause is because of the ear drum having a problem and I need to visit an E.N.T Specialist. He referred me to the E.N.T Specialist and I went and met her. She did the check-up and said that there is nothing wrong with the eardrum and this is something to do with only the skin infection. And I was in a fix as I again had to go back to the skin specialist who was not willing to accept that his diagnosis was wrong.

We see this happening quite often in our day to day work as well. Let us assume we have code responsibility shared between multiple development teams for a given product and there will be these areas which wouldn't be accepted by any of the teams and they will keep suggesting that the other team is responsible for this and they need to take it up. Quite often it is seen in the teams when we need to do integration with others code and we find a bug in the software after the integration is done. And there comes a situation that nobody wants to own this. Team that is integrating will start saying that it isn't their responsibility and the team who code needs to be integrated starts complaining that the other team doesn't know how to integrate. Though the code responsibilities are defined, these are very thin lines and irrespective of the code ownership there is a need for collaboration. It hardly takes one developer from each team to sit together and sort this out. It is way easier and less time consuming as compared to going into the situation of whose responsibility it is to do that. However, this ideal scenario is seldom seen. Most of the time it comes with the view of "not our responsibility".

There could be quite a few reasons why this could be happening.

1. Teams may be tied up with work more than what they could actually deliver.
2. A feeling of we all belong to the same team and our goal is to deliver the best product/solution/software may be missing.
3. The teams involved may be from different outsourcing vendor organizations
4. Lack of motivation due to frequent change in priorities
5. Lack of understanding of the bigger picture and hence teams may not understand their primary goals.

Reasons may be many but they aren't something that many of us would have come across and all of us would have different stories to claim, success or failure. And this is not a onetime thing that we fix a problem and it is solved for ever. As the delivery goals change these situations may arise every time that the teams have to deliver something together.

Of course the Product Management/Project Management teams have a bigger role to play, especially when we have these dependencies. The first and the foremost step are to identify and accept that there are dependencies in delivery. I am sure many of us might have seen the real time examples where we would have found that these dependencies will directly kill the projects. Once identified, there is a need to put in a process in place where the collaboration between teams during these integration stages are defined and agreed between the teams.

This can happen irrespective of the methodology that we follow. In Agile Methodology, it becomes easier as these dependency stories are ranked higher in the backlog and picked up soon. In other methodologies, as long as we discuss and agree on the integration strategy and approach between the teams and make it part of the delivery approach, should mostly help us in resolving this. Again, dependency management across teams in other methodology is a pretty big task when too many entities are involved. That calls definitely for the focus from the PMO to identify them at the earliest and keep a close track of them on a periodic basis so that these dependencies don't become bottlenecks for the overall delivery of the solution or the service.

Coming back to my Ear infection, I had to request the skin specialist to join me to meet the E.N.T. specialist so that they discussed collaboratively to agree on the diagnosis and after all collaboration is the way of working!