Sacrifice One Person

If a smaller diversion hits your team, then assign just one person to it until it gets handled.undefined

To be applied before

 * Someone Always Makes Progress and Team Per Task are generalizations of Sacrifice One Person.

To be applied after

 * Sacrifice One Person is refined by Day Care and Mercenary Analyst.

Contents of following sections belong to the original Organizational Patterns website and have been divided into following parts: Context, Problem, Solution, Discussion.

Context
... during a typical project, there are always a host of small distractions.

Problem
Small distractions can add up, and sap the strength of the team.

Even small distractions must be handled. But they take time away from the primary task. In particular, any distraction, even a small one, disrupts “flow” time, which costs significant additional time to regain.

Many small distractions are less desirable jobs.

Solution
Assign just one person to it until it gets handled.

This is very much like Team Per Task, except the distraction is smaller; it could seemingly be handled by one person half-time to full-time.

Discussion
The main group of the team moves forward distraction free. The person assigned to the distracting task may be unhappy, so try to get that person back on the team again as soon as possible. If you feel that one person is too much to sacrifice to this task and want to make it part time work, compute the loss of flow time that would result from trying to work this distraction and some other task.

If this keeps happening, you will have no one performing the primary task, and you ought to examine why you have so many distractions in the first place.

Owner Per Deliverable is the general ownership and accountability pattern. Someone Always Makes Progress is the general distraction management pattern. Team Per Task is the general form of this pattern at the team level.

Several patterns refine this pattern for specific contexts. Day Care addresses training as a separate deliverable from the software, and produces mentor as a profession. In Fire Walls, the distraction is a series of requests from outside the team, so one of the developers is sacrificed to act as project manager. That can produce project manager as a profession. The Mercenary Analyst handles the distraction of documentation, usually a “hired gun” who takes care of it, leading to technical writing as a profession. And in Gate Keeper, the constant inflow of technical information is the distraction, and one person is assigned managing that information as a distinct, part-time task. It is one of the major foundations for manager as a profession.

Don’t forget the sacrificial lamb when it comes time to Compensate Success.

Principles involved:

As for Team Per Task. The fact that handling the distraction looks less than a full-time job illustrates the significance of the time spent getting into mental flow.

Maximum parallelism, profession, or sacrifice? If the people do not like the task, they consider it a sacrifice. If they like the task, it becomes their profession. Thus, Fire Walls gives rise to the profession of project management, Day Care gives rise to the profession of mentor.

Sample situations:

A. Updating the project schedule. On Project Winifred, the schedule was out of date. We thought it would be fair to let each person on each team evaluate their own work. That would spread the experience, discomfort and load. What really happened was that progress came to a total halt. When the design team got back to designing, a month had gone by with no design progress, and they had forgotten some of the design issues that had been in their head. One of the teams used Sacrifice One Person. They drew lots, for one person to do the whole team’s estimation while the others got on with the main task. At the end of several weeks of estimation, that team had moved forward while the other teams were at a standstill. Thereafter, every team applied the pattern. The person working on the schedule really felt sacrificed. This pattern was originally called “Scylla”, as described in the story of Scylla and Charybdis.

B. Simultaneous release to QA and development of the next release. Project Winifred had one increment entering test at the same time design was starting on the next. We optimistically thought the bug fixes would take a relatively small amount of time, and so assigned the whole team to both fixing bugs and doing new design.

Each fix broke a designer’s train of thought for a period of time on the order of an hour, beyond just the fix. Three or four of these caused the designer to lose most of the day. Eventually, the designers gave up on the new release, because they knew the next bug fix would arrive before they would had recovered their thoughts and progressed on the new design.

We applied Sacrifice One Person, and assigned one person to bug fixes. We originally planned it as a half-time job, but found there was not enough time left over for the person to do any useful design. The person rejoined the new design team as soon as the release went through test.

A version of this pattern first appeared in [Cockburn1998].