Casual Duty

PROBLEM: What do you do with a team with nothing to do just now?

CONTEXT: A team is between projects, with uncertainty as to when the next assignment may arrive.

FORCES:

• The team has been successful in some measure on its recent project.
• They're not generating any revenue right now.
• Other projects may need people.
• The team's cohesion is good.
• The team wants to stay together - nobody's trying to jump ship, or if anyone is, he or she does not substantially affect the team's balance.

SOLUTION: Assign the team some fundamental work on infrastructure, tools, process, or whatever will benefit it in the future and perhaps some other teams as well.

RESULTING CONTEXT: The team stays together, stays focused. improves the relationships among its members, and produces work that is useful to the team in taking on the next project and to the company as a whole.

RATIONALE: It's a pretty good bet that there are dozens of things you wish there was time to do or build in your organization. Some examples:

• Tools that could make life easier for developers
• Training on and and integration of third-party products
• Prototypes and theories to try out
• Infrastructure and frameworks that you keep meaning to build
• Demo copies of tools to wring out for usability
• Processes to document

If you have a team coming off a project that wants to stay together, and there's a fair chance that some money-making proposition will come in sooner or later, it makes sense to keep the members together and focus them on a task that needs doing but always takes the back seat to profit-oriented development.

In our organization, management was wise enough to keep one of our teams together between projects, and in this time the team designed and built an architectural framework that has since become the basis for several new projects. This framework has already paid for itself with time-savings AND a timely and successful deployment of several commercial products built on it. Additionally, a couple of tools for project management and load building were produced as well, aiding current and future product development. Finally, the exercise really helped the team members to unite technically, with a good definition of roles and working relationships.

The term "Casual Duty" comes from the military. When soldiers, airmen, or sailors are awaiting orders or clearances or are otherwise between jobs, they are assigned to casual teams which take care of a lot of necessary tasks that aren't covered by permanent teams. It makes a lot of sense because the teams can be used very flexibly and it can often build morale and occasionally build new skills. It is true that sometimes casual duty may consist of picking up cigarette butts on the parade ground, or whacking weeds in a vacant lot, but often it can be meaningful work that benefits both the organization and the team.

RELATED PATTERN: TrialProject

AUTHOR: Don Olson