Team Work: Prepare for the Unexpected to Avoid Project Slowdown

On this blog, we try to highlight our successes so that large enterprises and individuals like you can learn from our experience. We’ve figured a lot of things out in the last decade or so, and we have a lot of wisdom to share about custom software development, about workflow, about productivity, and so much more.

But we’re not perfect.

If you follow this blog, you might have read Tim Hamilton’s post about our 2-Person Dev Teams and why we work in pairs or in small groups at Praxent. One of our mantras around here is, “If so-and-so got hit by a bus…” Basically, if one of our developers is unavoidably out of the office, do we have someone who is familiar enough with their work to pick up the slack until they get back? Just like it’s a best practice to back up your hard drive in case your laptop crashes, we try to “back up” our ongoing projects with two different brains.

It’s a foolproof system, but only if you follow it.

We learned the price of not following our own rule when one of our developers on a big project got sick. He was out for over a week, and – despite our best theoretical efforts – he had become the only person familiar with the API for the project. (In non-tech speak, this basically means we had to scramble to get another developer caught up quick, and at that point it ended up being preferable to slow down the project than try to bring in someone new. In short, we weren’t prepared, and productivity suffered.) On the surface, we had a 4-person Dev Team working on the project, but the work they were each doing had become so isolated that they might as well have been working on separate projects.

This goes to show that our collaborative Dev Team philosophy is about much more than just dividing and conquering. It’s about sharing ideas and sound-boarding problems, it’s about teaching each other, it’s about creating energy and increasing work velocity, and it’s about being ready for the unexpected.

We love our developers, and we sincerely hope that they never get hit by a Greyhound (figuratively or literally), but as a custom software agency, we have to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. Last time we weren’t. Next time we will be.

How do you prepare for employees to be unexpectedly out of the office? Or how have you triaged when you lose a crucial member of a team? Share your stories below!