This blog post is inspired by Mike Harris’ blog on how lone testers can work across teams, which is well worth a read. I really resonated with Mike’s animal metaphors which he used to describe his commitment levels to the team he supports.

In my current role as a DevOps and Quality Specialist, I am a team of one that works to support many other teams in my department. There are times when this can feel overwhelming: receiving support requests from teams across the world, reacting to issues as they arise, trying to proactively and continuously improve our processes, reporting to management – the list goes on! But the overwhelm can be prevented when you establish how you’re going to work with each of these teams, and setting appropriate boundaries and expectations.

You are not a superhero!

The first person to set those expectations with is yourself. As much as I’d love to be able to be in two places at once or grow more hands, I need to accept my humanity and realise I cannot do everything that is going to get asked of me at the time that it gets asked. I also need to understand that this is okay, and this is often the hardest part of being a team of one! You will be reliant on your self awareness and self confidence to keep you going on the tough days – so remember, you can only ever do your best!

Over-communicate

Communication is always key in any team based role, but when you are a team of one working with a large number of other teams, communication needs to evolve into over-communication. None of the teams you work with will likely have full visibility of your workload, and this can be a root cause of overwhelm or feelings of isolation when working alone. Over-communication combats this problem by encouraging you to share every and all bits of information with all of your teams whenever you meet with them. This may be in daily stand-ups for example.

Information you can over-communicate includes:

• Your availability for meetings and calls
• Your work plan for the day across all of your teams
• Your workload forecast for the week ahead
• Any requests for help for any piece of work
  • You never know who might be able to help!

Pig and Chicken

Finally, make sure you and your teams explicitly understand the relationship you have and the expectations that come with it. You can’t be 100% committed to both teams. Work with your teams, your manager and other stakeholders to define your commitment levels to each of them. Ideally, get them written down somewhere so you can refer back if needed. You can also revisit these commitment levels periodically to see if they are still the best solution. I’d recommend reading Mike’s blog on this topic where he explains how he is a fully committed ‘pig’ for one team, and a helpful ‘chicken’ with the other. I’d say my working style is similar to this too!