Assign, don't ask

Learnt a small lesson in management today: At times it may be better to just assign tasks to individuals and not ask them.

We have two main developers who have been working closely together on all of the programming for the project. We were reviewing the project implementation plan today with the objective of assigning specific tasks to specific individuals.

Everytime we came to a task that a developer needed to do, I'd ask who wants to do it and I got the answer, "Put both our names, one of us will do it." The developers were simply not able to decide who wants to do what. I wanted to put a specific name against each task so that there are no confusions during the implementation and no task is missed. It would also be good for later accountability if any questions or issues came up, to know exactly who did what.

Since I did not assign the tasks myself, at the end of the meeting, I found that most of the tasks for the developers ended up with both their names, leaving room for ambiguity as to who would do what.