Management Antipattern: Task Assignment by Accident, or Worse

This is not the face you want your team to get familiar with

Short version: Assign tasks in a transparent manner

Generalized: Visibility to task definition, priority, and assignment allows for better organization of work

Ultra-specific request of managers: Watch out for duplication of effort, for the appearance of favoritism, for consistently discarded effort, for consistently changing priorities, and for consistently missed milestones despite people putting the work in. These are likely a result of task assignment problems.

This is a software engineering article.

For the moment, imagine you’re working in a bookstore:

  • You start to take an inventory of the reference section, and, while you step away for a short break, someone else starts the effort there from scratch.
  • You are the go-to person on poetry books, but the store manager keeps directing questions on that subject to someone who doesn’t know about poetry.
  • You’re asked to write up a summary of why people should shop at your bookstore, spend half a day on it, submit it, and never hear back on the subject again. This sort of discarded work happens weekly for you.
  • While you are taking someone’s cash for a sale, the manager asks you to urgently restack books in the…

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