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As long as owners are involved in the project everything goes well, as soon as the project is handed over to a project manager or a team lead, there are problems all over the place starting from communication to plain careless mistakes. A lot of bootstrap startups have this problem, especially in India and Paksitan. Why don’t employees take as much ownership as the owners? How can they be made to take ownership?

One of my friends, who has an offshore development center in Bangalore, was in England last month. For one of the projects he asked his project managers if everything is well and if things are done as per the client’s specifications. He was told that everything was fine and that the client is happy. So he scheduled a meeting with the client and also gave him an invoice for the work done. Not only this, he mentioned this client as a reference to his new clients in England. It turned out that the client was not happy at all, and that there were lots of bugs in the application and the programmers have been working for days but they haven’t been able to fix much. This was a total disaster primarily because he had already given the reference of this client to his other new customers. The reason for this mess up was not that programming was messed up, but rather the fact that he was kept in dark about the original situation of the project. This is because the team never took the ownership of the project.

One of the main reasons a team may not take ownership is because the team usually doesn’t know what depends on the project. They usually don’t have the big picture of a particular client and a particular project. A project may be a pilot project to be followed by a lot of other projects. Also it may be so that the client is very influential and it’s good to keep him happy. These things are quite difficult to explain to a team lead or a project manager. An easier approach would be to ensure that someone is ultimately responsible for a project no matter what happens. This is so that no blame can be shifted and someone knows who’s responsible for the entire project. For example, a project manager should be responsible for everything in the project: from specifications to quality assurance, maintaining scope and making sure that the project doesn’t exceed budget. In most cases, people need just one person to take owners, rest of the people will take ownership themselves. Also for any top level manager, the main idea is to ensure that projects are completed in timely manner with reasonable quality. To ensure this, someone has bear all responsibility for the success as well as the failure.