[Foundation-l] WMF Engineering org charts

[George Herbert]

On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 6:05 PM, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 5:45 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Has this been an observed issue within the WMF?
>
> In some areas. In my view, a well-functioning agile team is
> self-organizing and self-managed, and it's a manager's job to
> primarily set that team up for success, hire the right people, replace
> the people who aren't working out, and help escalate/resolve blocker
> or coordination issues outside the team's scope. Putting so much
> responsibility on the team's shoulders is in my opinion a good thing,
> because it treats them as adults accountable and responsible for the
> success or failure of their own work.
>
> Where we're trying to complete complex projects with a part of a
> person's time here, a part of a person's time over there, we lean
> heavily on managers to help with the resource scheduling and project
> organization, and that's where things are currently getting iffy at
> times. In our 2012-13 hiring plan submission, we're proposing a
> Dev-Ops Program Manager position to help with some of the particularly
> hairy cross-coordination of complex, under-resourced backend projects
> with operations implications (an example of that kind of project is
> the SWIFT media storage migration).
>
> There'll likely also be another layer of depth in the org chart as we
> grow and evolve further, but that's something to do very carefully
> because it increases real or perceived distance between people, and
> making people managers of 1-2 people is fairly inefficient.
> --
> Erik Möller
> VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
>
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>
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Sounds like a good thought out, informed answer.  Thanks.

-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com