One of the most frustrating situations you'll face as a Chingu PM is when members of the team don't respond to requests from you or others on the team. One of the obligations shared by both PMs and team members when they sign up for a Voyage is to commit to participating as a team and to see it through to the end.
- A team member signs up for a Voyage, but never shows up.
- A team member participates in initial team meetings, but then stops participating and doesn't respond in Slack.
- A team member communicates infrequently and as a result is "out of sync" with the rest of the team.
- At your first team meeting:
- Make sure your team understands the importance of teamwork, supporting each other, and the commitment they've made to completing the Voyage.
- Collect everyone's Slack id, email address, and any other communication channel that will help you maintain contact as the Voyage progresses.
- Identify members of the team who may need technical assistance and schedule pair programming sessions to mentor and support them. Team members sometimes leave Voyages because they are overwhelmed and this is one step you can take to prevent this situation.
- Life Happens! Events sometimes occur in peoples lives that will prevent them from honoring a commitment. Make sure the team understands that if this should occur what matters isn't that they leave, but how they leave. Communicating the need to exit to the PM should be a requirement, not an option.
- If a team member stops responding, allow a reasonable time frame for continuing to reach out to them (no more than one week). If they still haven't responded, divide their work among the rest of the team, adjust your project schedule accordingly, and move on.
- Use the weekly team checkins to report team members who have stopped participating. Depending on the size of your team, the complexity of the project, and where you are at within the Voyage, you might also want to ask for the addition of new team members to fill the gap.