In Favor of Single-Team Ownership

Suppose you are an avid gardener who owns a home on a beautiful street. Your front garden has carefully chosen perennials that bloom throughout the year, so there is almost always something flowering. Your house is on a cul-de-sac, with a green space in the middle of a roundabout at the end of the street. In the morning, when you drink your coffee and complete your daily Kakuro puzzle, you look out over your garden and the roundabout green space across the street.

Although the center of the roundabout has a lush lawn that is always well-kept, you can’t help imagining what it would look like with a garden in the middle. Your instincts tell you to drive to the garden center down the hill and return with a trunkful of plants (you know the maintenance of community spaces is governed by the HOA [homeowner’s association], and you can’t dig up the cul-de-sac without approval).

The next meeting is in two weeks, so you direct your energy into doing some drawings of what the garden could look like. You write a description of the maintenance effort with the intention of volunteering to be responsible for this garden. As the day of the meeting nears, you submit an agenda item for “Proposal: Garden in the cul-de-sac green space”. Then the phone calls begin.

Henry (the treasurer) warns you that this year’s HOA budget has already been exceeded and that there is no budget for special projects. Before you can explain that you were volunteering to buy and install the plans, Henry excuses himself — he’s late for a meeting. Jan and Ren stop by one morning and tell you at great length about the importance of local plants, and insist that any garden in common areas should be made up exclusively of native flora. Edward (a professional landscaper) mentions that this is a great opportunity to finally install the irrigation system he’s been pitching for years, and says he’ll push for that at the meeting. (You love watering by hand and see no need to derail the project with an irrigation system install. Eugh, now you’re thinking of this as a “project” — you just want to put a few flowering shrubs in the green space!)

All the waste

• misunderstandings: You weren’t requesting HOA budget for this, but Henry assumed you were. You have to spend energy correcting the misunderstanding, and Henry is a little frustrated and stressed until the misunderstanding is corrected.
  • waste: unnecessary conflict resolution
• unnecessary complication: you don’t share Jan and Ren’s goals about gardening with native-only plants. Also, although native plants are best for local wildlife, any plants would be better than a lawn. Your idea is an improvement. Since you don’t have experience in gardening exclusively with native plants, Jan and Ren are asking you to do the harder, slower work of learning a new technique. You’re also familiar with the local nursery that does not specialize in native plants — you may need to drive further and find a new store to buy the plants from. Once the planting is done, the native plants may have different maintenance needs (although since they’re native, they’ll very likely be lower maintenance). Although Jan and Ren’s idea might be a good one, it will take extra learning effort.
  • waste: additional learning (new skills, new materials) when the existing skills and materials would have been sufficient
• extra scope: Edward has been trying to sell his professional services to the HOA for years, and thinks he can piggyback on your proposal to advance his sales goal. As Henry has already clarified, there is no additional budget for the garden, so Edward’s scheming is jeapordizing your proposal.
  • waste: unnecessary communication to disentangle your proposal from Edward’s ideas

And so with software

The more people you involve in a proposal, the more complicated it gets. Folks have their own assumptions, preferences, and agendas that can derail your initiative. You may have the emotional energy and communication skill to correct the bad assumptions, navigate the different preferences, and sidestep the ulterior agendas. In the best case scenario, you spend time and energy on avoiding all those obstacles. If it doesn’t go so well, the initiative never starts, or starts with unnecessary complications or constraints that make it much more difficult or expensive than you wanted.

The more people you involve in a proposal, the more likely it never moves forward, or that it moves forward with unnecessary cost. No matter the outcome, there is an increased communication cost (along with the emotional energy required for negotiating and resolving misunderstandings).

A supposed solution that won’t work

Forget the HOA; just start digging up that shared lawn!

That won’t end well. All the concerns and opinions that came out when you put your proposal on the meeting agenda will still come out, but with even more passion. Either you’re dealing with angry neighbors while you garden, or a passive-aggressive garden feud ensues.

Ignoring controversy doesn’t make it go away.

Solution: individual ownership

This won’t help your gardening problem, but it can help with software development. There are many techniques for growing teams to use to split a large application into independent components that can be owned by individual teams. If you are experiencing the costs of shared ownership, you may benefit from some of the techniques described in Monolith to Microservices by Sam Newman.