Introduction
Under certain circumstances, when one team is blocked by another, it is worth considering lending the busy team resources from the blocked team in order to get a project moving again. Let’s call the process of lending another team a resource “away team work”. Away team work can be tricky to get right. This doc discusses a process for lending another team a resource and some of the considerations that should be kept in mind for making it run smoothly.
Is what I’m blocked on a good candidate for away team work?
Ask yourself whether what you need done is:
- Low-risk: Changes to high-business-impact components are best made by the teams that own those components. If the change seems high risk, how can you de-risk it through fallback logic, design changes, or requirements de-scoping?
- Clear from a product perspective: Projects with remaining ambiguity on the product side can cause thrash and take more time than expected from the already blocked team. This includes things like PoC experiments, UI/UX, and go to market strategy.
- Small: It is best to do away team work at the task level. Shy away from trying to design a new component in another team’s codebase; you will need to get too much context.
