“Helping” versus being helpful

One of the suggestions I give in Program Management for Open Source Projects is to build credibility when you’re starting in a program manager role by being helpful. Find something that needs done that others don’t want to do and do it. This is pretty solid advice for joining a project in any role, actually. But there’s a catch: not everything you can do is helpful.

One thing I’ve tried to teach my kids is to ask “would it be helpful if I _?” before jumping in. Sometimes well-intentioned help makes things worse. Making more work for someone is not a great way to win your way into their heart. What you see as helping might turn out to be entirely unhelpful. When you check to see if what you mind is actually helpful, you avoid accidentally being unhelpful.

So how do you find helpful things? Asking “how can I help?” is the most straightforward way, but you don’t always get a great answer. The people you’re trying to help are busy and they may not want to sit down and try to figure out what’s a good match between the project’s needs and your interests & skills. Or they might think they have it all in hand and there’s no help needed. (This could be true, but usually there’s something you can do.)

You can look for things that are supposed to be done but aren’t getting done. This isn’t necessarily tasks that you think should be done, by the way. Look for tasks that the internal documentation or schedule suggest need to be done. If you have the skill to do it, that can be a good place to start. You know the project thinks the task needs to be done, or did at one point, because it’s documented.

Another good target is tasks that are tangential or extra to what someone is primarily doing in the project. If you can fully take on a task that someone else is doing because it has to be done, then you’ve earned a lot of love. Early on in my Fedora Program Manager days, I offered to take on sending the weekly blocker summary emails from Adam Williamson. I had the skill to do it and it freed up Adam’s time to focus on finding (and sometimes fixing) bugs. He seemed to appreciate it, so it was probably helpful.

What’s typically the least helpful is jumping in and doing something that someone else is already working on. Unless the task can be split into independent parts, jumping in alongside someone who is in the middle of something is likely to result in being unhelpful. This, of course, does not apply if the person is training you.

All of the above is general advice. Every situation is different, which is why asking “would it be helpful if I _?” is so important. When you get agreement on your help, your work will be helpful.

This post’s featured photo by Christopher Alvarenga on Unsplash.