Workhorses and Show Ponies

It has been an painful week. There has been lots of dealing with people a lot more senior than I am over screw-ups that I had very little control over. In addition I got my first chewing out by a tech manager for letting the schedule slip, but ironically (or maybe not so ironically, for you learn more from your mistakes then from praises) it was the most beneficial coaching session I've had for a while.

The project has slipped for a number of reasons, but one of the main reasons is due to the way I allocated tasks to people. The difference between a good project manager and a great project manager is that a great PM can work with the idiosyncracies of their team. And within each team are what my tech manager called 'Show Ponies' and 'Workhorses'. And this is how he explained how they work.

Workhorses are easy enough to understand. They are the people who do the hard painful labour. They will sow the fields, write the big modules of your code, put up your walls. They rarely complain, they don't make excuses for being late and they are happy with just doing the work. They are the backbone of your team and losing too many of them will break the project.

Show ponies are the ones that prance from one activity to another. They like to know more stuff and strut their stuff to others. They are excellent for communicating with others, solving puzzles, creating designs but you wouldn't use them for heavy lifting, because its they don't roll like that. They are smart enough to do the work, but they aren't motivated enough by grunt labour to do it. Without them, you won't win any prizes and you probably won't innovate, but you should be able to get the project done regardless.

So when composing a group, you do need a good mix of the two if its possible, though it isn't very often that you get a choice about who you get to pick. Grads make for excellent workhorses, which is why any growing business needs a reasonable number of them. They need to be paired with good senior staff. This is because often senior staff don't believe in the organization, but they do believe in looking after their young proteges. Senior staff are more difficult to split into work horses and show ponies as they seem to eveningly split into both types and often show characteristics of both.

So what I did was allocate work the wrong way around and now I've screwed my schedule and made the other team member very annoyed. Ideally I should have allocated smaller tasks to the pony and made them more free for design/reviews and so on, and given the grunt work to the work horse which would mean it would be closer to being done on time.

It is kind of disconcerting seeing this kind of comparison of your peers to farm animals, being made by a manager, but it doesn't make it wrong, and this kind of simplification helps to guide future decision making.