The bus factor

An interesting little adage I heard recently. The prime idea is how many people involved in a project have to be incapacitated (ie hit by a bus) in order for the project to be stalled or fail.

In projects involving several people you want this number to be as high as is possible. This means tending away from ideas such as having one person with a disproportional number of responsibilities and people hoarding roles and privileges. The more people you have doing more things, the higher the levels of collaboration and productivity.