Critical

The main antagonist of the movie holds a vast empire under his iron fist. He is the nucleus that links the entire empire and draws its strength from. On the parallel side is another strong willed person who is willing to go to any length to defeat this antagonist and capture the vast empire he holds. Through a series of multiple attempts, the antagonist is defeated and with his fall, the entire empire comes falling down. The END of the movie.

Not only the movie, but throughout the history empires and governments have vanished due to the fall of a single power source. So many examples that will teach us to decentralize power and ruling authority. And, yet, the software industry has not learned to move away from a term called as "critical resource"

SSK company holds a critical project. The project comprises of 6 people, while they actually need 8 people to work efficiently. Nevertheless, everyone is working hard to fulfil the project deliverables. There is another resource with the name Sreenika, who is by the way our "critical resource." Even though there are efforts from the other team members, any major incident or complex issues are always dealt by Sreenika, she neither passes on the information to her peers nor does the management care about equal skill distribution because, the work is "handled".

One fine day Sreenika decides to shift her loyalty to another organization and hell broke loose. The moment Sreenika announces her resignation, the entire team gets cold sweat. Chaos ensued before, during, and after a major incident.

All of these resources come to a conclusion that their project is doomed and it might be the end of the careers. The management on the other hand is trying hard to retain this "critical resource", but at the end of the day, the "critical resource" moves on, she hasn't shared her knowledge to the rest of the team, the new experienced replacement was not able to do justice, the existing team members, fearing an end to the project, shifted. The project has fallen.

Takeaways:

• Complete dependency on a single resource harms the project in the long run
• There should be enough emphasis on knowledge sharing and skill normalization
• Project managers should make sure that roles within the project should be shuffled regularly
• The resources should step out of their comfort zone and shift projects to re-skill
• Critical resources should teach their peers to fish, rather than giving them the fish when needed