How to deal with a Team lead who expects me to deliver ad-hoc tasks and asks me to deliver it by EOD? [closed]

Question

I have recently joined a new company, where my lead expects me to finish a task in a few hours, As I am new to this project, I am taking some time to figure out everything out. There are no estimations asked, the management wants just the things fast. I am not sure if it's me or the team. But I believe haphazard planning, delivery and bug fixes gives a project a bad quality. I am asked to test end to end, figure out fixes, deliver it .

Could you give any strategies so that I can tackle this problem without quitting the job?

Answer 1

The situation is what it is.

Sometimes situations eventuate where there is a bit of chaos, and you're jumping on bug fixes as quickly as it seems. People want things ASAP etc.

The goal of an employee isn't create a project with good quality, it is to do what is necessary to allow the company to make profit. And more directly, to follow the directions make by their leaders who think they know how to make that happen. (Sometimes they are wrong, but as a newcomer, there is little you can do about that).

The consequence of this goal is that sometimes corners are cut, and companies stray from what would be considered best practices.

If you don't like this environment, that's understandable. But you need to establish if this is the standard operating procedure, or if this is just something short term. Asking your colleagues questions will give you the answer.

Answer 2

People tend to confuse "agile" with "lack of planning".

That said, You are encountering the project management triangle

• Time
• Cost
• Resources

You get to pick any two, and your company has decided to pick Time and Cost. What that means is that the resources given to planning are sparse. This is not uncommon, if you don't know the big picture, you are not in the position to judge whether this is poor planning, or if they are simply in crisis mode.

I'm a programmer, and during the COVID Crisis, when we first started working from home, I was doing application support, desktop support, networking and anything else that was needed. You will find this happening throughout your career.

What you can do is talk to your team lead and ask what the priorities are and where you can focus your efforts best. Then, lean into it.

Give it some time and then see if this is normal for your company/team or if this was just handling a crisis and trying to get out from behind a bad situation. Once you figure that out, you can determine if this is the right environment for you.

Answer 3

Based on the tags and the description, it would seem you diagnose the problem as ineffective planning. I will proceed on the assumption that this is the case. It is easily frequent enough to consider.

I am also assuming you are in some kind of development area, vs operations. Completely different rules apply for the latter.

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"Could you give any way so that I can tackle this problem without me quitting the job?"

IMO you have to convince the decision makers that it is in their interest to do development in a more/better planned fashion.

Very unlikely that you can do this with words, but a series of vivid examples might do. By strange coincidence, these tend to be more common in development projects that are run by the whack-a-mole method.

The more difficult aspect is making it easier for the appropriate person to take responsibility for the results. Ideally this means adapting their methods, which means slowly easing them into a better alternative and helping them with some planning options. This will actually create more work for you, and you have to be careful not to overstep boundaries. A different tack which I do not recommend is to try to get that person to move on elsewhere. You're looking at a year or two at a minimum for any of this to happen, IMO, with some risk that it can go on indefinitely.