Recently I read a book "Responsibility at work" by Howard Gardner from the Infosys central library. It was a thought provoking collection of research articles from various scholars working on various aspects of responsibility, ethics, dos and donts at workplace.
One article which I liked the most was concentrating on "Taking Ultimate responsibility". When a reader reads an article, he relates it to himself and that's what I did. I don't remember the exact article but I will summarize the content and how it is related to my work.
When I reach office, I generally have 9-10 tasks at my end waiting for my actions, these may be mails awaiting my response, regular builds awaited to be monitored, regular merge notification response queries from various teams. As per the article, it is my ultimate responsibility to address them without even considering the level of effort and recognition.
First thing should be to priorities them and note down at daily planner and if possible assign deadlines to them. Being a build and release engineer, I should go one step ahead of my defined role of releasing the builds, it should include maintaining consistent bug deadline monitoring and resolving inter-team defects conflicts. That's how we take "Ultimate Responsibility".
