Day Care

If your experts are spending all their time mentoring novices, then put one expert in charge of all the novices and let the others develop the system.undefined

To be applied before

 * Day Care is a cross-specialization of Sacrifice One Person, Someone Always Makes Progress and Team Per Task.

Alternatives

 * Work Flows Inward has a similar intent as Day Care.

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

Context
... the project has just brought on several new people.

Problem
Your experts are spending all their time mentoring novices. You begin to hear things like “We are wasting our experts,” or “A few experts could do the whole project faster.” Indeed, the experts are not proceeding at the rate you or they would expect, because training the new people is draining their energy, time and concentration. But the new people must be trained, by experts, of course.

At the same time, you must make progress on the project itself.

Solution
Put one expert in charge of all the novices, let the others develop the system.

Separate an experts-only “progress” team from a training team under the tutelage of one or more mentors. Select the mentors for their ability to teach design and programming (object-oriented design and programming, for example) to novices. Let the progress team design 85-95% of the system, let the training team focus on quality training, delivering only 5-15% part of the system. Transfer people to the progress team as they become able to contribute meaningfully.

Make sure that the training team does not simply do training exercises, but actually contributes to the final system in an ever-increasing way.

If you have many people to train (more than, say, six), you will have to design a series of tasks for them to attempt. Otherwise you may give them a small, real part of the main system to design.

If the people in the training team are the ones who know the domain, you will have to make some further adjustment, or else the division may cause conflict.

Discussion
The result is that most of the experts can continue to make progress on the project. The novices contribute a small part of the project, that grows as they gain experience.

In extreme cases, though, you eventually have too few people to constitute a progress team.

How many people can one mentor train, if training results and not running software are his/her deliverable? A small, reasonable number is five. I have heard of one person mentoring 15 people on five concurrent mini-projects.