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As background, I previously worked in a development role at my current company. A new development role was created last year to solve a set of perceived issues in one of our workflows - due to my experience in similar situations, I was promoted into this new role.

Over the last year, many of the achievable goals have been far slower to attain than expected; and much of the expected engineering work hasn't actually appeared yet. As such, I have been conscious of the possibility that I may face redundancy - although this hasn't been expressed to me from management as yet (I am also not on any kind of perfomance improvement plan).

Recently, my manager has made three requests that stand out to me as potentially setting the stage for future redundancy. These are:

  • Request for how integrated I still am with the previous team, and how much my work overlaps with them.

  • Request for an updated 3/12 month roadmap of the specific work to be completed.

  • Request for a technology stack document; specifically detailing which languages I am using and will be using.

My question is; are these requests generally standard in preparing to make a role redundant (or when considering to make a role redundant)?

I obviously cannot ask anybody to judge whether I am or am not at risk of redundancy. But as these requests were never made in my previous role, and I have no experience of a redundancy process - I am curious whether these fit into "standard things you'd expect to ask your employee, if you're considering making them redundant".

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    What country ? "Best practices" can vary a lot of location.
    – Hilmar
    Commented Sep 10, 2018 at 15:13
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    @Hilmar Apologies - it's the UK. I've tagged this now.
    – user81330
    Commented Sep 10, 2018 at 15:15
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    "specifically detailing which languages I am using and will be using" - will be using after they make you redundant? I think you have hold of the wrong end of the stick; this looks more like promotion. Depending how friendly you are with your boss, you could have "a little chat"
    – Mawg
    Commented Sep 11, 2018 at 13:16

3 Answers 3

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While it's possible someone is trying to gauge the value of the role you are currently filling, it is just as likely (or more likely, even) that they are simply trying to be good project managers.

These seem like questions that are commonly asked in order to assess staffing needs, get budget approvals for continuing work, and to make sure there is documentation in place for others to use should the need arise. I don't see any obvious red flags.

It could be that the funding for your project is in question and they are trying to put things into place to keep it on hold and have you re-join your former team until things open up again. But this is just a guess.

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It's certainly possible that those questions would be asked as part of a process of either looking to remove an employee, or a role from the team.

As you say though, it's impossible to say from that whether you're at risk of redundancy, and there's many more situations where those questions may be asked (such as looking to move your role into another team, or even looking to hire someone else to work alongside you.)

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First question stands to me as retention attempt, perhaps to split your focus between current and previous teams while engineering work catches up

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