How to get an out of control project back on track
A nice success story for a common project problem:
- No clear leadership.
- Lack of domain knowledge.
- Incomplete requirements.
- Too many teams.
Someone needs to take control.
But why should developers share the organizational burden, you may ask? Couldn’t you simply pass it down to the PO or someone from the upper management?
Assuming they have the capability and the appetite (and are given management’s blessing) I think anyone from the greater team could achieve this as long as they understand how to best communicate with the range of roles — back- and front-end developers, QA, design, management — and that the solution is focussed on the end user. In this case it doesn’t sound like a coincidence that it was front-end developers:
we knew QA and backend devs well understand the domain, our front-end team can provide fast feedback loops, we are closer to the UI and flexible enough to allow for late changes
Of course the next job would be to prevent this from happening in the first place.
— Via The Changelog