RIFs, Restructurings, Leadership, and Org Mapping / by Owein Reese

What is the one thing you need to do as a software manager if your team has absorbed responsibility for managing more systems or has lost personnel? I hope you said “redo my org mapping.” If you didn’t, take 5 minutes to read what I have to say.
You need to identify the gaps in your new org: skills, knowledge, experience, and resources. Gaps represent unbounded risks; risks which tend to materialize at the most inopportune times. Minimization of risk falls under your purview as a manager and it is your responsibility to assemble, quantify, and plan to address as many of them as possible. It is not, however, your responsibility to do this in isolation.

If you have never done it before, find someone who has. If that’s no longer an option (RIFs suck, I get it) then do the following:

  1. List all the applications your team is responsible for

  2. List all the technologies that go into them

  3. Ask your team to rank themselves in terms of knowledge of the apps

  4. Separately, ask each person to rate their confidence with the technical stacks you now own

  5. Finally, ask them to rate their knowledge of the domain

Now take that list and sit down with your tech lead, product manager, and if possible, boss. Work out what is or isn’t acceptable. Then figure out what impact mitigating the issues you’ve uncovered has on the quarterly or half year plan.

Rumsfeld said it best when he spoke “there are known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns; with the later being the most difficult.” You have a chance to remove a whole bunch of unknown unknowns before one or more become a catastrophe.