# 6 - Teams and Dedication

Dedication means placing an individual on the team full time. The objective here is to capture your team members's mind share so that they think about team issues even when not doing team work. In reality, you will not have them 100 percents of their time at work - sickness, training, consulting to past projects, and similar activities are bound to intervene - but about two third of their hours at work is reasonable and sufficient.

Clearly, this overcomes many issues of priorities. When a project is undergoing a great deal of change, people who are on multiple projects are inevitably missing during key periods on the subject project, so they are continually out of date, and others waste time bringing them back into the project. Beyond this, assigning an individual to more than two projects is simply wasteful of human ressources, as describe in a lot of studies on this topic.

With a second project assigned to individuals, they can fill any gaps in the primary project, but after this, they run out of gaps to fill. Additional projects contribute to inefficiency, by racking up project at least the time needed to put down one task and get back up to date on another one. If you switch frequently or if the tasks are undergoing rapid change, the losses are higher. Even with only two projects, you gain some efficiency but lose the focus, commitment, and accountability that accompany concentrate attention. If a project is undergoing a great deal of change, you should dedicate key members of the team full time so that they can keep up with it.

An ever better way is to assign individuals to two projects (provides maximum efficiency), but tie the projects together. That is, the "second project" should be to look around for unassigned but needed work on the first project. With this sort of secondary assignment, a team member who is idle scans the project to see what is on the critical path that could use attention, who could use some help, or which upcoming task would benefit from attention now.

Most teams need some types of members you usually cannot hope to keep on board full time - people from supply chain group for instance. However, rather than asking for a certain percentage of their time, which is unlikely to be fulfilled, ask for a certain portion of the work week, such as every Tuesday from 11am until 5pm. This is much easier to monitor and thus is more likely to happen.

Dedication to one team strengthens accountability to that team. Some individuals feel uncomfortable with this level of accountability and prefer to split their efforts and maintain a fog about their commitments to their teams. Watch for and correct these situations. Better, prevent them by dedicating as many people as possible.

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