I worked with two teams that shared a database specialist, for a fairly proprietary system. Because she was on two teams, they had her attend all meetings for both teams. Two standups, two planning meetings, two retrospectives. She ended up doing crazy amounts of overtime because she couldn’t get her regular work done during the day. Her days were filled with meetings, and it was only after everyone else left that she got anything done.
Eventually she got frustrated and left, leaving two teams completely stopped in her wake. Neither team had the faintest idea how to do the thing that she had been the specialist in, and now they were scrambling to find someone else who knew how to do that thing.
Do I blame the specialist? Not at all. She held on for longer than most of us would, before she left.
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Fractional people (one person split across multiple teams) is an exercise in Resource Efficiency, otherwise known as “keeping people busy”. The company had a “resource” with a specific skill set and they wanted to make sure that she was kept busy 100% of the time. If we look at the overall system (Flow Efficiency) then we quickly realize that keeping her 100% occupied was a poor choice. To be effective, we need to have slack in most parts of the system.
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Having her belong to two different teams and therefore going to double the number of meetings is incredible waste. She should have belonged to only one of the teams and than any work that needed her skill set should have gone to that one team that she was on.
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Having her remain the only specialist without any attempt at cross training is poor risk management. She should have been working with others for a good chunk of her time so that others would be learning at least the basics of what she did.
It’s worth calling out that all of the issues above were pointed out well before she left. It just wasn’t a priority for the company to fix any of them. Until all of a sudden it was.
This isn’t the only time I’ve seen this situation although it may have been the most dramatic when she left. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen two teams so completely stopped all at once.