We’ve all had times where we were personally tasked to do something really stressful at work that was of “critical” importance. Mostly likely the work needed to be completed yesterday. Other times we could be losing a client if we don’t implement feature X which was promised to them. For some, this is a daily occurrence. When this inevitably happens, ask to be part of team. This improves your chances of success even with one additional person. Here’s why:

  1. It shares the stress amongst the team. No one person carries the full burden.
  2. Pushing back on unreasonable requests is much easier when you have more voices of “reason”.
  3. You get second/third/fourth opinions about what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by and how it should be done.
  4. Your team becomes the sanity check in insane situations.

Some scenarios where having a team is useful:

  1. Unreasonable deadlines.
  2. Massive architectural changes.
  3. “Quick” fixes that could destabilise your production system.
  4. “Must have” features then need to be completed ASAP.
  5. Migration or deletion of production data.

You might be refused even one additional person to share this “critical” piece of work. You then have to ask yourself: “how critical is this piece of work if the company doesn’t want to put more than one person on it?” Quite likely you’ll see that it’s not critical at all.