Person Dependency

I attended an interview few years ago for a development manager position. The interviewer asked me what the biggest risk factor in projects that I had managed was. I replied person dependency. His next question was how do I eliminate it. I answered “by employing robots” (I really gave this answer to get the interviewer’s attention). He asked me to repeat my answer and I repeated it. He asked me to explain my answer. I told him that we cannot eliminate person dependency, we can only minimize its impact in a project. He nodded his head agreeing and I went on to explain how to minimize person dependency in projects. The risk factor for projects varies from manager to manager and also from project to project. For the same manager top risk factor for Project A and B can be totally different.

Here are some of strategies I have been using to minimize the person dependency in projects. The most obvious choice is to have sufficient documentation. The challenge is nobody wants to sit for hours typing documents alone.

Spotlight – Initiate a regular knowledge sharing session every week for an hour. People love to show off what they are doing and their expertise. Record those sessions with software like Webex or GoTo meeting. If the presenter is using white boards use smart phones to take picture of the white boards during the meeting. Store them on a network drive for people to access it. Hire an intern or student to transcribe the video.

Automation – Automate some of the tasks that are manually done by team members. For example publishing website to different environments, backing up and restoring the databases in various environments. This automation helps anyone in the team do a task irrespective of their skills. For example there are several tasks that QA team needs help from development to perform like data setup, data clean up and few others. If these tasks are automated by development team then it minimizes the person dependency. Some people in team handle additional non-core responsibilities like auditing, metrics collection and analysis etc. It is better to think of automation in these areas too.

Quiz – It is better to test the understanding of team members in various areas of the project and the applications that are being developed. A bi-weekly quiz about an application or process area will help managers gauge an understanding of who has good understanding in various areas of the projects and applications. Track the result and then use the result to plan for spotlight training.

Peer Review – Spotlight sessions mostly provide a high level technical or business overview of the project areas and applications. Peer review is the chance to provide in-depth details of the applications and project areas. Make peer review a compulsory task in the team. QA hand off meetings are also peer reviews and I have seen that teams having regular QA hand of meetings have built good number of experts in both development team and testing team. This strength on both sides helps to improve the product quality consistently.

The most common problem I have faced while managing teams which have low number of experienced developers and high number of freshers is that the senior developers spend a good amount of time mentoring junior developers and also helping them troubleshoot issues in their programs. It is very important for managers to track how independently the junior developers can work as they gain experience. For teams having this problem measuring and tracking person dependency is very important.

Hope these ideas will help you and your team. In the next post I will explain in detail how to use a formula to track person dependency. The pre-requisite for that formula is to have a task and time tracking tool which will allow team members to log effort even against tasks that are not assigned to them. The tool must also have capability to show assigned vs unassigned effort at task level and individual level.