Teams Leaders what are they, and do we need them? - Extension from Re: Re: Do C-Level managers, and business drivers really need to know about XP?

Well guys, gals, guess what another fun and enlightening thread about to start I hope.

During the context of the C-Level Mangers thread I started, and amm very happy to see such great comments and feedback on from all, great list this.

I have seen the role of team leader be brought up a lot, now as always I tend to do things a little different in so far, as in my organization, and hopefully to those I join in the future, I DO NOT HAVE TEAM LEADERS, no wthese may seem rewally strange, but is for a very valid reason.

When you have a dev project, and a team of people working on it, by selecting someone upfront to lead it, you automatically force that person into a responisibility position, and normally would choose the best person of the team for that project. HOWEVER the fact remains that no-one person knows all of the project better than anyone else, so what I do to cater for this is create a dynamic lead, (okay yes this is a team lead like role) a Dynamic Lead (for want of a better word) is chosen by the team based on knowledge of the current issue/sprint/spike/story being coded at the time. This in essense means that at any given dev. time slot in the project I have the best technical resource (knowledge/experience/not nec. skill) for that time slot.

this has worked wonders in getting people to be more empowered, and the level of motivtaion in my teams, it has alsoo removed the issues of resentment/disrespect/mistrust and belief that managers in place are not the best for the job (I suspect I will be asked to define this more later :) )
of teams leads and management in general.

It is always the team that decides the lead for a given time slot, I would only intervene or a PM would if people are shirking responsibility and abusing the system by always selecting the same person. A good PM would see this I do hope.

thats it for now

Scott Worley