Force multiplication
Two short stories of how getting things done can happen, when it’s not doing the things myself.
The first one
A server needed to be created and configured. This is a special snowflake server. It’s owned by team B.
My team provisions servers all the time. I understood the scope of changes: I could’ve done it myself, or elected an engineer on my team.
Instead, I reached out to the team’s manager, and asked something like:
Hey, this is nominally in your team’s area of ownership. You all have a full plate, and don’t do server config often. It could be a learning opportunity for your team, but we could also just do it. What do you think?
She said yes, there’s interest on the team in a learning opportunity and a cross-team win, so let’s have an engineer on her team take it on. Nice!
Later, I reached out to the engineer and asked:
Hey, have you provisioned or configured a server before?
No, she hadn’t. All good, just checking, I said, and asked if it’d be helpful to have a call where we go through the tooling and typical workflows. We had that call, and it went great – she was over-prepared by reading some of our docs ahead of time. I asked lots of socratic questions and she engaged with them and asked her own questions too.
It got done! She showed her work to the engineering department.
The second one
With a different team and a different engineer, I “gave” them a task in a similar way: reached out to their manager, etc. They reached out to me with maybe one or two questions total. I reached out to them with a question, basically “hey, how can we fix this error?” and they replied with a “yep I can fix it nod”.
Basically, they did not engage with the socratic question, so I did not ask more.
It got done done done! They showed their work to the engineering department.
I had reached out to their manager – like in the first one – and the task getting done happened about 2 months later.
The learning
Patience pays off for everyone.
Both of these stories happened in the context of a multi-month project which I was leading.
As a result of choosing this path instead of the “do it all ourselves” path, we have strengthened the organization. The skills to provision and configure servers, and provision cloud resources, are not frequently needed by other teams, but when they are needed it is often a late discovery in a project that already has a lot of momentum.
In the grand scheme of the software-shipping machine, it is better for these skills and familiarity to be distributed in pockets around the organization.
That’s an example of force multiplication.