In my last project I had a resource who was non performing (Non Performing Developer,NPD). There are levels of non performance. The reason I am stating the resource as non performing is that he does his tasks but don't deliver them at the level expected. There will be some thing pending w.r.t to the task done.
To give an example we were working on bootstrap and pages designed were not having the same specification(page width) as specified by UX designer. When the project was started initially, the developers had some issues and used more size than needed. Usually in such scenario any developer would go back and fix things that were not correct. But the NPD never do that. Being a senior resource, he always stopped others also from fixing it. Fortunately I was managing the team and I could get him removed from the team. Then other resources easily fixed that issues.
So the reason why I am discussing about the NPD is that I am sure there will be many like these. The problem is the NPD become a weight on the team and because of their lack of enthusiasm or because of their laziness or slowness they slowly become a burden on the team. When we have projects with fixed timelines it's most imp that everyone in the team is contributing and at their peak.
I can understand that some developers are fast to deliver and others are slow. In such cases we might have to plan and think when assigning tasks to team members. To some extent we can deal with members who are little slow to deliver and it also depends on what kind of project we are dealing with.
The other reason such NPD's have become common in the IT industry especially in service based companies is because of manager's negligence. Once Manager puts up a team for a client, he is only looking and interested in the billing, as long as the money is flowing, they are not generally concerned how everyone is performing or there is something that needs to be done with the team.
Other solutions when you can't get away with them is to treat them like dummies or they should be overridden by some other developer. Meaning he is doing all activities as far as the client is concerned. So that way we can concentrate on this NPD, gives him areas of improvement and etc. This is more suitable in non scrum projects, where client is only concerned about quality n deliver. So "make him dummy" means somebody else will pitch in and complete the tasks. Let's say this NPD is slow in delivery or doesn't deliver quality code or deliver with lot of bugs. This is not an ideal solution but, if I am the overriding developer for a NPD then it's easy for me to code tasks from the scratch than fixing the npd's code.
Please share your thoughts on how to deal with the NPD in projects where you have no option but to deal with them.
Top comments (0)