Task Shadowing
We’re familiar with job shadowing, but what about task shadowing? Let's explore how we can effectively use task shadowing when performing critical tasks in a production environment.
Definition
Task shadowing is a concept similar to job shadowing but more focused on specific tasks or processes rather than an entire job role. In a production environment, especially when dealing with critical tasks, task shadowing can be a valuable practice to ensure accuracy, quality, and knowledge transfer.
Considerations
Understanding when and how to utilize task shadowing is crucial. Let’s break it down into a few key points to consider when implementing task shadowing:
Identify Critical Tasks: Determine which tasks in the production environment are critical and would benefit from task shadowing.
Select Appropriate Engineers: Choose individuals who will perform the task and those who will shadow, ensuring the latter have the necessary foundational knowledge. Preferably the one shadowing should be a Senior Engineer that has the know how.
Establish a Shadowing Plan: Plan the task shadowing session, including when it will take place and what will be covered in the session. If physical presence of the person shadowing is not possible, we usually utilize screen sharing software like Teams or Zoom. Person executing tasks on production environment is sharing a screen and usually waits for confirmation of the person shadowing.
Engage in Active Observation: The person shadowing should actively observe, point out the mistakes and double check what is being executed.
Benefits
We observed number of benefits utilizing such process. Let’s have a look at some of them:
Training: Task shadowing can be an effective way to train less experienced team members on critical tasks. Observer can add additional comments to the one executing commands, so they are more confident in what they are doing.
Documenting: During task shadowing, the observer updates the steps involved in the task in case there is any change needed in the procedure for future reference.
Double-checking: In a production environment, critical tasks often require high accuracy. Task shadowing allows for a second pair of eyes to oversee the process, reducing the likelihood of errors. We, as engineers are very prone to see other people’s errors and shadowing is leaning on it heavily.
Real-time feedback: The shadowing individual can provide or receive immediate feedback on the process, identifying potential issues or areas for improvement.
Minimizing risk: During the execution of particularly sensitive tasks (e.g., deploying a major update or handling a high-risk operation), having someone shadow can help ensure that all steps are followed correctly, minimizing chance of mistake happening.
Contingency Planning: Often times person shadowing will give feedback about possible issues we can encounter executing a specific task, along with remediation procedure for it, ensuring that the person executing task is aware of what to do in case something goes wrong.
Building Confidence: For someone who will eventually take over the task, shadowing provides hands-on experience that builds confidence. It relieves stress and basically removes unnecessary fear that could build up otherwise.
Cross training: Sometimes we are using shadowing as method of ensuring that more people are capable of performing critical tasks if the primary person is unavailable.
Feedback: Last but not least, person shadowing can give valuable feedback to the one executing a task after the session. Observer can give a positive feedback on well performed task, or points out areas that the person executing crucial task should work on, to do better next time.
Summary
By integrating task shadowing into our critical production activities, we really enhanced the reliability and efficiency of our operations as well as lowered stress of engineers that are involved with executing these tasks. This is especially important in a sector like crypto and finance, where millions of dollars are on line for every minute of downtime. If your organisation is not doing task shadowing, you should strongly consider it.