A previous employer hit the problem where there were a ton of legacy features that didn't have clear owners and so it wasn't clear where to route bug reports.
Their solution was to build a catalog of every feature and then assign EVERY one of them to an existing team.
Teams might end up responsible for features that they had never seen before and had no knowledge of... but that was fine, because every other team was in the same situation.
It worked great. Bugs got fixed. Teams figured it out.
One thing I've learned from responding to emergencies is that you can't just yell "help" at a crowd, you have to pick out someone specific and say "You, dial 911."
We had someone collapse on campus and have a seizure. An entire group of people stood around this person as they wet themselves, nobody doing anything but watching. I picked out specific people from the group to help, told them what to do, and told everyone else to back away. There was even some guy who got pissed at me for telling him to leave the area, but he's exactly the kind of person you want out of the way.
Lesson here, be specific, be aggressive, and take charge when it's needed, because it's very unlikely that a bystander will do anything but watch.
The truth is that accountability isn't the problem, its the lack of resources, prioritization, and ability to change things that make them burdensome. After a certain point you're just trying to solve the problem in the least annoying way possible.
A previous employer hit the problem where there were a ton of legacy features that didn't have clear owners and so it wasn't clear where to route bug reports.
Their solution was to build a catalog of every feature and then assign EVERY one of them to an existing team.
Teams might end up responsible for features that they had never seen before and had no knowledge of... but that was fine, because every other team was in the same situation.
It worked great. Bugs got fixed. Teams figured it out.
I've often seen something similar happen in places with high turnover.
Team owner leaves or is let go and then their projects get randomly assigned to other people.
That's not terrible. What is terrible is when there is no mechanism for swapping or trading projects.
It’s like the bystander effect but for code, lol.
Just pick someone and give them the task.
One thing I've learned from responding to emergencies is that you can't just yell "help" at a crowd, you have to pick out someone specific and say "You, dial 911."
We had someone collapse on campus and have a seizure. An entire group of people stood around this person as they wet themselves, nobody doing anything but watching. I picked out specific people from the group to help, told them what to do, and told everyone else to back away. There was even some guy who got pissed at me for telling him to leave the area, but he's exactly the kind of person you want out of the way.
Lesson here, be specific, be aggressive, and take charge when it's needed, because it's very unlikely that a bystander will do anything but watch.
The truth is that accountability isn't the problem, its the lack of resources, prioritization, and ability to change things that make them burdensome. After a certain point you're just trying to solve the problem in the least annoying way possible.