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Team Leader

      Team leaders are responsible for the effective functioning of individual development groups. Their success can best be measured by the success of the individual engineers or contributors on their teams.

      Team leaders should be very aware of the scheduling and productivity realities that face their teams. They should have a clear sense of how productive their team members are, and they should prioritize to facilitating rather than coding (or testing, or writing). However, if things are running smoothly, team leaders are free to contribute at the low level, but not at the cost of lost productivity for the team.

      Team leaders must use effective management tools (such as Pert charts and Gantt charts), and must be aware of the gap between estimates and reality as it affects their teams.

      Team leaders may serve an informational function between engineers and directors, when it is more efficient to do so. But a team leader should never be an impediment to effective communication between team members and anyone else in the organization.

      Every team will have at least a few problems and difficulties during the project. In extreme cases a single significant problem can block an entire team from making progress. Team Leaders should attempt to discover these problems as quickly as possible and work effectively to resolve them.

      Team leaders should work with team members and directors to assess and implement effective and beneficial processes in as appropriate a manner as possible.