A useful and amusing concept in project management: Truck Number. It's equal to how many project members could be hit by trucks before the group endeavor as a whole crashes and burns.

Maximum efficiency means no redundancy: everybody does something uniquely valuable. So in the extreme, the most tightly-run projects will have Truck Number = 1 — and thus will be extraordinarily vulnerable to failure if anything happens to anybody during the effort.

(see also OneDeep (15 Nov 1999), OverQualified (4 Mar 2004), ...)

TopicProgramming - TopicOrganizations - 2005-01-27

(correlates: OverQualified, UpcSatori, SixWhoKnow, ...)