The Surgical Team

The Pareto principle states that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the team. And every manager wants to staff their team with the team members who constitute the 20% of the lot. But practically speaking, it’s rare that you strike gold.

This chapter details how managers can work with this constraint and yet create a scalable team structure.

Scenario: There is a big delivery which involves 200 people. How you manage the communication between this team? Also, you have to consider that only not everyone in this big team will be a star performer.

Solution: The surgical teams. Create smaller teams headed by star performers. Below is the proposed structure in light of 2021 changes:

The Surgeon: The star developer who is the chief programmer responsible for delivering the module assigned to the surgical team.

The Co-pilot: This person is the alter ego of the surgeon. She knows what the surgeon does and can replace her if the surgeon is not available. She can also work as a pair programmer.

The Administrator: This can be the facilitator who is shared across the teams or in an agile project, the scrum master. The purpose of having this is role is to have a person looking after, non-programming aspects of the project.

The Architect: This again is a shared resource amongst various teams who is responsible for coordinating with the surgeons directing them to a common goal.

The Trainee: This person does the non-critical tasks to support the surgeon and in the process learns the tricks of the trade.

The Testers: A two-member testing supports the development team in delivering a quality product. The development team should consider the testing team as the client because the testing team does a very critical job and should be provided with a quality product that should be verified, and not re-developed, during testing.

The Functional SME: This is a shared resource, who needs to take ownership of what is being developed and co-ordinate and assess the impact of modules being developed.

This solution applies to small projects and is scalable.

My thoughts:

Although this solution is scalable it comes with a caveat. This solution takes its strength from the star performers but its success hinges on the star power of the coordinators, mainly the functional SME and the architect. If these roles are not filled with star-performers, the whole structure will tumble.