The strongest predictor of team success

By taking ownership and defining clear responsibilities, you can tap into the befit of having a small team. What do I mean?

According to the state of DevOps report, one of the strongest predictors of success for a team is its ability to make decisions and progress without the need to coordinate or ask permission from people outside the group.

That means sharing many responsibilities between a small number of team members. This is normal and required for the team to move fast. Problems arise when it needs to be made clear who owns a particular responsibility. That may lead to what I call the “not in my job description” attitude.

Let’s say you have a small development team. To make progress, all these responsibilities need to be covered by the members:

  • Architecture
  • UX / UI
  • Dev
  • Test
  • Release
  • Support

Even in well-oiled teams, the last point is where they most often fail:

  • It’s Thursday morning. The internet at the office is down. The CI/CD server is offline. Who’s responsible for fixing it?
  • It’s Sunday evening. The production server is slow. Users are complaining. The database shows a high CPU load. Who’s responsible for fixing it?
  • It’s deployment day. One of the team members’ computers dies. The motherboard failed. Who’s responsible for ordering a replacement? Do we have a backup?
  • …

Each of those problems needs to be solved for the team to keep progressing. In poor-performing groups, issues like that are passed around like hot potatoes. It’s in nobody’s job description. Progress stalls as people need to coordinate. Or reach out outside their team for support. Then wait.

Well-performing teams recognize the importance of solving these issues fast. And they assign responsibilities to team members accordingly.

It’s only possible to predict some scenarios and prepare for a limited number of eventualities. It would be inefficient to try to anticipate them all. Yet when something happens once, the second time around should come as no surprise to anyone. That’s what makes the difference.