Unassigned Work Items (Tasks)

Most people fear the unassigned task.  In our implementation of Team System (TFS), I added a name to the list called unassigned.  It's led to a more self managed motivated team and I have no regrets.  This works great if you have a self motivated team or a PM who pays attention.  Yep.  That's an OR.

How did I do it?  I still use active directory to drive my dropdown in the assigned to field but I added a user called unassigned.  This gets around the problem of TFS requiring something in the assigned to field if you're driving it off of active directory.

"But if the work item is unassigned nobody will do it!"  Did I mention that most people fear the unassigned task?  I do not.  Here's why.  If people only claim enough bugs and tasks to last them the next few days or weeks they are motivated to get those done so they can claim the fun tasks or bugs before someone else does.  Another advantage is predictability.  If a person has claimed 3 months of work and takes longer than expected on the first month of work, nobody else is working on the on the work items that are claimed but not being done.  In this case, high priority features and bugs aren't being taken care of in the right order.

As a project manager, I can look at the list of unassigned tasks and see which ones are high priority to I can let the team know that those are the next things to work on.  We manage priority by using the priority and iteration path fields, but if there's too many priority 1 items in the current iteration a little verbal communication goes a long way.

Something else that drives everyone outside of my team crazy is that I let my high performing teams choose their own tasks and bugs.  I help scope out the work at a high level, create the basic tasks and load the planned bugs.  The team adds tasks where needed and fixes bugs as they're identified.

As time goes on, the team takes more and more ownership of the project and project goals.  I believe that allowing people to self manage this way is a large part of the reason.  They're software developers - creative responsible professionals.  Creative people like to have ownership in a creation and like to feel that they're contributing more vision than a few lines of code.  The project is always better for it when the team participates in the vision.

The end result of having unassigned tasks and asking the team to self manage is that I have each team member looking at the project and work item list with an eye to the big picture.  Each team member is concerned that we're getting the right things done first.  They let me know if they see issues.  The extra sets of eyes are very helpful.