Team Lead Distilled
Team Lead role is integral for any team (not only software development) regardless a specialization and adhered methodology.
Effort made by TL is best described by activities performed both on regular basis and on demand.
Efficiency of the effort depends on TL’s authority specified by technical expertise, past experience, inner strength and confidence, as well as willingness and ability to dispose of own and team capabilities. This is what we most often call leadership competencies.
Herewith projects are not executed in vacuum those TL is acting in accordance with the context presented by the following items:
Team. It’s composition, motivation and contribution status.
Stakeholders. Client side representatives, dependent teams and own management.
Deliverables. As a variegated output of team’s contribution.
Scope. Defining expectations in terms of features to be implemented and tasks to be accomplished.
Milestones. Forming critical path of project execution based on defined scope.
Assets. Everything that sustains team contribution, knowledge sharing and tasks execution.
Infrastructure. Building working environment to develop, test, launch, install and run updates coming with team deliverables.
TL’s responsibilities are recurrent and distributed throughout project lifecycle. Despite periodical: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and repeatable each sprint — there are activities that performed at the beginning and at the completion of the project or its part. Additionally they can be mapped on particular context items forming Team Lead Activities Matrix.
Detailed analysis of each activity should include justification of importance, list of potential challenges, rules to follow, possible input sources and expected outcome as process description elements. While knowing who else can perform the task, considering timing recommendations: preceding activities, duration and time of execution, and understanding context items on which effort is primarily focused — would help TL to adjust own leadership experience.
