Feel Good Friday - What role do you play on the team? ⚽

[Andrew Zimmerman]

Happy Weekend-Eve, Community!

With World Cup 🏆 excitement in the air, I’ve been thinking about how every great team needs different kinds of players.

Not everyone is the goal scorer. Some people are the steady defenders. Some are the midfielders connecting everyone. Some are the super-subs who jump in at exactly the right moment. Some are quiet leaders and coaches. And some are the fans cheering the team on when things get rough.

So today’s question is:

What role do you naturally play on your team? It could be at work, in your local community, or in your friend group.

Are you the organizer, the encourager, the problem solver, the connector, the coach, the dependable finisher, or something else entirely?

Have a great Friday and a relaxing weekend.

GOOOOAAAAAALLL!!!!!!!

[Jimmy Seddon]

Great question @Andrew Zimmerman!

Specifically when it comes to soccer/football, I'm right at home being a defender.  I'm not there for the fame and glory, but my team knows they can always count on me to keep the opposing team away from out net.  And, to feed them a perfect pass for a scoring opportunity.

I feel like my work as an Atlassian Admin is very similar.  I don't work on the features we sell to customers, but without clean well-defined processes, the ability to complete and ship those features would be exceptionally challenging.

Have a great weekend!

[James O_Connor]

Great question @Andrew Zimmerman! I'd say I'm different things in different situations as the need arises, but I definitely gravitate towards coach most of the time.

I love the point that you raise about teams needing different kinds of players - sometimes that can be hard to explain to senior managers at work when they expect everyone to be kicking flashy goals all the time, when some things require the steady, patient team member playing from the back. 

[Barbara Szczesniak]

Good topic, @Andrew Zimmerman 

I've had jobs where I felt comfortable enough with my coworkers to tell the Director of our group that I didn't consider him "my boss;" he was just the person on the team filling the role of Director.

On my current team, I am the one who monitors this community and the Atlassian release notes and notifies others about anything that affects/explains the applications they use.

I am also the person who documents our software, so I am able to look at tickets for changes and ask questions about how they might affect/break existing features.

[Stephen_Lugton]

Depending on how we're asked for support, or how unrealistic the timescales are I am 'Mordac, the Preventer of Information Services'

But the rest of the I'm more like the manager; making sure that they team understand

• Why we're doing specific tasks,
• What value they're generating,
• What the task outcomes should be,
• Who will be doing the task (this can just be down to who has the permissions / experience to do the task),
• What they need to learn to do the task,
• What dependencies does the task have,
• Etc.

After that it's mainly asking

• How much effort is the task?
• Why aren't you working on the task?
• What's blocking you?
• Why are you doing a different task?
• Why aren't you working on the task?
• How much effort is left on the task?
• Why did you promise to deliver the task by this date when you knew it wasn't possible?
• Why aren't you working on the task?
• Why aren't you answering my messages?
• Do you need help with the task?
• Where did this other task you're now working on come from?
• Why did the Chief Operating Officer call me late last night asking why the task was deployed to Production without telling him?
• How quickly can you remove the task from Production?
• How many people know that the task went into Production?
• Why did you deploy the task to Production without CAB approval?
• What do we need to do to fix the issues caused by the task going into Production when it shouldn't?
• When do you think you'll know how many people were affected by the task going into Production?
• What do you mean 190 thousand people?  There were only 110 thousand people in the database!
• When did you set up that sync?
• Who knew you'd set up that sync?
• That still doesn't account for 30 thousand people, where did they come from?
• What do you mean you've just booked the next two weeks off as annual leave?
• Who else knows how to fix the task?

*The above list of questions may have missed a few variations on the subject of "Why aren't you working on the task?", but is otherwise a fairly accurate recap of my interactions with one of our engineers over the last month or so!

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Stephen_Lugton You have reminded me why I decided long ago never to become the manager of people!