Lead by Example

As an engineering manager, I am always looking for new ways for my to improve our software delivery process. This usually starts with noticing a gap or inefficient part of our current process and getting my teams to try something new to address it. While there are times that my team is willing to blindly follow my suggestions, it is far more common for them to push back and question the change. I would expect nothing less from them.

The most effective way that I have found to encourage my team to change their behavior is to lead by example. Not only are they much more willing to adopt the change when I demonstrate that I'm willing to do it myself, it also gives me an opportunity to try it out and identify additional improvements that can be made.

About a year ago I took over management of 2 new-to-me teams in a different domain at work. I immediately discovered that our process for handling support cases and defects within the team was extremely inefficient due to the lack of defined expectations and an unwillingness to collaborate across teams. I slowly started to introduce new expectations and a new process:

1. The engineer on-call was the point person on all reported issue, but could pull in other team members as needed
2. We should be responsive to all requests, even if the initial response is "I'm working on a different issue but will get back to this as soon as possible."
3. On every support request, a defect was to be created in our backlog for tracking. If one already existed for another team, we would ensure it got moved to our backlog for transparency of who was working on it
4. We would review new defects at stand up each day and determine priority or if we needed to engage with another team

Initial adoption was not great and we kept losing track of the requests and I was getting negative feedback from other teams. I knew that I had to try something different to convince my team the process would work. For the next 3 months I took the lead on responding to each request that came into both of my teams. I ensured tickets were created and/or updated properly and that someone on my team was digging in. It did not take long for the backlog of defects and support requests to dwindle and positive feedback from other teams to roll in.

Gradually I started to remove myself from the process and let my teams take over. Other than a couple of reminders, the last 6 months we have continued to use and evolve the process. In addition to more efficiently resolving defects, a bonus side effect has been improved relationships with our Product Support organization and the teams directly adjacent to us.