Alwanza.net Soft Skills -> IT Task Ownership
Taking Ownership as a Working Style:
What does "taking ownership" mean?
- Declare your intention to do the work. Let your teammates, manager, and whoever assigned the work know that you have accepted the task and when you will start to work on it. Sometimes this just means accepting a ticket in a queue. How it is assigned will determine how you should communicate that you are accepting the work. This helps to avoid confusion about whose task it is and duplication of effort. It also lets your boss and your coworkers know that you are working on an assigned task so that if they have more work for you they can assess if the other work is more or less important or urgent than the task you currently have.
- Document any part of the work that is difficult or not standard knowledge for your role or nonstandard in its implementation. Post it where your team can access it. This improves the knowledge base of your team and saves time when the process needs to be repeated.
- Provide status updates to management and your team at regular intervals. If your task stretches over a day or two, keep your teammates apprised of your work, particularly if it impacts their work. This reassures your managers and your team that you are being diligent and that they can depend on you. It also helps them to evaluate when they will be able to start their tasks for which yours is a prerequisite.
- Communicate any difficulties or blocking issues that are preventing you from completing your work. Holler if you need help. Sometimes you may be assigned something that you don't know how to do. You can still "take ownership" of the task if you can get help with the part you don't know. When something is assigned to you that you don't know how to do, it is your responsiblity to say you don't know how to do it and to determine if you can figure it out (read documentation, try some tests, then do it) or get a teammate's help or guidance, and continue to do the parts that you can do until the project is complete.
- Validate your work. The task isn't really complete until it is tested and the solution is found to work. If there is any way to test your work, do that before you consider it done.
- Communicate when the project is complete. Make sure your coworkers and managers know you are available for the next assignment (or can start on the next task if it has already been assigned). This also lets your coworkers know they can proceed with their work for which yours was a prerequisite.
- After participating in any maintenance or upgrade, make yourself available in case some related issues cause errors.
- Consider ramifications and related issues. If you were working on an outage or an issue that might also exist elsewhere or may be related to another issue do not consider completing your one little assigned portion, "good enough". Take time to think about what issues might be related to the task you completed. Even if they are outside your assigned tasks, report back to your team about your findings.
- Give credit where credit is due. If someone helped you complete your task, make sure you acknowledge that person's effort. He/she will be more likely to help you again when the appreciation is acknowledged.
- If there is some reason that you will be unable to complete the task, or unable to fulfill your deadline or original estimate of completion time, let your managers and teammates know, and let them know as soon as you know. That way if the task is urgent, it can be reassigned, or the estimated time of completion can be reevaluated and whatever adjustments need to be made can be made.