Archive for October, 2012
Herd Ball
If you have young children who play sports, you may have observed the phenomenon called Herd Ball. If you don’t – let me explain. This is when kids are playing baseball, football, soccer – team sports involving a ball. Where the ball goes, they go – as a herd.
Ever have one of those situations where there are “too many cooks in the kitchen”? In IT, this happens a lot from my experience. The lines we work in are blurry. Blurry lines are not a bad thing but it can be when you have a group of people trying to get a project done. Some people would say “hey, it’s a good thing – let 6 people all contribute on a task – just means they are “collaborating”.
Collaborating is a great thing when a team is stuck – trying to brainstorm ideas. Think of it another way –
You pay 6 people an hourly rate of $55 an hour.
They are trying to get through QA testing – everyone pitches in.
Each person writes their own scenarios & test cases. Each person has a 10 total scenarios with duplication of 5 scenarios across all 6 people. Each scenario takes 2 hours to execute.
You just wasted 2 hours * 5 people (1 person has to execute) * 5 scenarios * $55 per hour – $2,750.
Why are we okay with this? That’s 10 hours of work in total – what could you do with 10 hours? What could you do with an extra $2,750? What if this is occurring across multiple projects per year?
This is where organization needs to occur. Someone has to take point – act as the coach – officially or unofficially. Dividing up the work based on skills & risks. Maybe your tester is new and it’s a good thing to have more than one perspective on the test results. It’s still less costly to have 2 people duplicating effort as a method to reduce risk than 5 people.
A lack of organization or understanding of roles will lead to duplication of effort. A little planning upfront can save you money in the long run.