I am a reasonably experienced C# developer (about 5 year experience) that has recently been put in charge of my first development team as technical lead (varying between 3-5 other developers). Over the last 4 months in this role, one dilemma that keeps arising is trying to find the right degree of sharing awareness of the communication that goes on between the project manager, account manager, clients, designers, CEO and myself (especially via emails).
On the one hand, I know the more awareness each developer has of the overall direction of the project, the better they can understand the scope that their particular functionality has in the big picture.
However on the other hand, a lot of my time seems to be lost in the sea of emails between all the different stakeholders and managers, so I like to think that isolating the developers to just "what they need to do their current bit of work" will keep them free from interruptions.
I have considered just BCCing all the developers so they can filter these emails and essentially "opt in" to all the emails, but I'm concerned that some of the developers will just see this as extra noise to deal with. It may open the door to "too many cooks" if all the developers want to contribute to too many discussions. Yet on the other hand, other opinions can help me reach better decisions (i.e. House MD style).
Phew... so much to consider. Anyone have some wise guidance in this area?
It sounds like you're technical so I would give you this advice: Follow Joel Spolsky's advice on what Program Managers do. Basically, try to isolate your developers as much as possible so they can be as productive as possible.
He just mentioned this briefly in this recent article, How to be a program manager, but he has gone into more depth on this topic before. Look through his past writings for more info:
Once the spec was finished and the development team got down to work, I had two responsibilities: resolving any questions that came up about the design, and talking to all the other teams so that the developers didn’t have to.
If you aren't technical then you need to select someone from your team to help with the design work and they will have to interface with the customer a little to figure out what the requirements are and what the best design is.
EDIT: On Joel's home page there are two sections titled Tech Lead and Program Manager. Look at the articles there for some more info on program managers, especially Human Task Switches Considered Harmful.