A common situation contractors face is the “Oh shit, we really need help right now on this project” firefighting scenario. These occur for many reasons — shifted milestones, employee departures, new feature requirements, or — and this is the trickiest — management realizing/assuming/believing that their current staff can’t get the job done. Management distrusts their in-house team and starts looking for a knight in shining armor. And now your phone rings.

You’re now faced with a potentially disastrous political nightmare as you step into a bad situation with the expectation of rescuing a team or project. Your very first task should be assessing why the client needs you or, to be blunt, what exactly went wrong? Was the previous programmer out of his depth, incompetent, or lazy? Or was the technology requested simply impractical such that the previous programmer had been tasked to do an impossible job? Is it poor communication between management and development and, in fact, things are going fine? Does the producer simply not like the current direction and wants a scapegoat?

Remember that you are there to solve a problem, not to determine blame or make someone else look bad. But before you wade in, make sure that you won’t be in the same boat the current programmer is in six months from now. Talk to the existing team, other programmers, the producer — try to figure out what everyone’s perceptions are, and then see if you can paint an accurate picture of what the real issues are.

Even after you draw your own conclusion it’s not necessary to share it with others. You risk making enemies and looking unprofessional — and you may still be wrong. If you assume the role of savior among the heathens the rest of the team will resent you and management will raise expectations of your abilities.

If management had unrealistic expectations or did not support the staff, then you’ll need to keep that in mind. Ensure that everyone knows up front what you can and can’t do and that you don’t want to repeat what happened before. Address the issues you see as diplomatically as possible. If the previous engineer failed in large part due to a lack of tools, hardware, software, and QA resources, ensure that doesn’t happen to you!

The hiring of external contractors is rife with political danger as well. Very often you’ll be brought in due to a majority vote or even the caprice of someone in power, which means that there will be a (potentially powerful) individual or group of individuals that were opposed to your hire and may still passively opposed your presence. An existing programmer may have been passed over your position and now secretly hopes you fail so he can get his opportunity. You may have taken away a headcount from another manager’s team who wanted to expand his fiefdom. Your hire may be an overt slap in the face to an individual or team whose work is being discarded to make way for your own. Something as petty as your hourly rate may foster resentment.

So while on the face of it there may be smiles and jocularity and enthusiasm, there’s a chance that there will be some hidden antagonism lurking — be wary and professional, and do not get sucked into the politics of why and how you were hired.

On the flip side, if you are brought in with considerable clout, you may find employees ingratiating themselves to you in the hopes that you say positive things to management. This, too, is a minefield, since it’s tempting to “right obvious wrongs”, but rarely will you get the whole picture in a short period of time, and by expressing opinions about dynamics you’re not fully cognizant of, you run the risk of alienating others and possibly the very individuals responsible for hiring you. Keep your mouth shut unless your job is to offer opinions about the company’s politics.

All that said, while tricky, the reality is that for many freelancers coming onto a project in need is our bread and butter. It’s just a potentially dangerous minefield if you don’t know what to expect.

So when stepping into any situation where an existing team needs outside help, remember the following rules:

• Don’t assume that everyone else is incompetent
• Don’t assume you’re the team’s savior
• Figure out what went wrong and ensure that it doesn’t happen to you
• Observe and steer clear of any political dynamics

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.