How to get features implemented in a project that you are not working on?

Question

I have some really good ideas for this project but I'm not working on it personally. I don't have much pull in this company, so how do I get my features (good ideas) implemented in this project?

Please help re-tag this.

Answer 1

I would read the section on "Stone Soup" from Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master for some ideas.

Answer 2

You have to persuade the people who can make changes to the project that your ideas are good, and better than:

• the ones that paying customers have,
• the ones that the team members who do work on the project have.

You will need to show that they will bring in new revenue that exceeds the cost to implement. You will need to show that they are consistent with the long-term vision of the project leaders.

Answer 3

Have you tried sitting down and organizing your thoughts and suggestions into a memorandum and forwarding that to people who might be receptive? I think this has a better shot than simply some water-cooler bits-n-bytes talk and will indicate you have devoted some effort and energy in your thinking. Might also help to sharpen your ideas as well.

Answer 4

Best possible way: befriend someone who does have influence. Offer the ideas up to that person and tell him/her that person they are welcome to present the ideas as their own. If the ideas are truly good and the person has any sense of what is good for them and the company, your ideas will be rewarded. The reward may be indirect and not public, but if you do it consistently you might find yourself with an offer to join the team.

Answer 5

I'd try this

1. Try to come up with a presentation of what these ideas are.
2. Provide real world use cases if possible.
3. If you can do a prototype, you should with the expectation that it's going to get thrown away.
4. Practice your presentation once or twice.

Then when you feel you are ready mention this to your supervisor and people who are in charge of the product, like product/project managers and try to get a meeting setup where you can present your ideas. Keep the presentation short, and provide minor details on implementation and cost. Most of the time people love ideas but they are afraid it's going to cost a lot or the implementation would take too long. There is always a chance that even after doing this you may not be heard, but atleast you made the effort to make things better.

Hope this helps.

Answer 6

If the persuading/befriending ideas that others have mentioned don't work, can you work on it in between tasks or in your spare time and make it a 'pluggable' thing? And by pluggable, I mean so that it doesn't necessarily get checked in with the main source tree since you are developing it without approval as such. Once you've completed it, you can show off...ahem, show case your work. (of course that means this pluggable piece would be something that didn't require changes in the existing code base, otherwise this answer is useless).

I've had situations in the past at my workplace where I've wanted to add features or write something better, I would end up writing a wrapper around the existing code that would hide the ugliness and allow me to add the things I've wanted.