This week in the pm-clinic discussion forum: Topic #43 – Assigning work to programmers :

I’m a former programmer who now leads a team of programmers and testers. Recently my team has complained about how work gets assigned – right now, I’m air traffic control, directing work at one of the 10 people on my team. I’d like to do something more structured, like what Scott outlines in his book (Chp 13) but my team is split across 5 or 6 different projects: I can’t easily make 2 layers of goals and divide up my team.

My problem is this: I don’t see an easy way to give my team more responsibility for choosing who should work on what without bogging them down in organizational crap. I accept their complaint, but the alternatives seem worse.

So my question is this: What alternatives should I be considering for how to distribute work across my team, given the constraints I’m facing? I’d be happy just to see a list of different approaches people have tried. Bonus for pros/cons.

– The work distributor