Hit Factor
Hit Factor is “The number of people in a team who have to be hit with a Truck/Bus (accident) before the project is in serious trouble”
Hit Factor is extreme thought which pushes the project into risk situation ! this factor substituted by “Emergency Sick leave”, “Family Emergency ”, “take vacation at the same time”, ..etc. If any part of project has a Hit factor of one then project moves to particularly fragile situation. In an ideal situation, everyone on the team will know all parts of the system so that the loss of any one person would have minimal impact. In reality, many projects rely on one or more “heroes” who are the only ones who understand certain critical parts of the system. When these heroes leave, we must be prepared to recover.
WHAT TO DO ?
If we have a hero on our team, the best thing we can do is reassign that person to a different part of the system. This will allow the replacement to ramp up while the hero is still available for support. If we wait until the hero has left then the ramp-up will be significantly more expensive. An added benefit to reassigning the hero is that this person will now have the opportunity to work on something different. Since the hero’s tend to be the most technically competent members of the team, this will usually mean that the new area will improve once the hero has worked on it for a while.
Hit factor is a quick metric that will highlight potential problems in our project. Having hero’s on our team can be very beneficial but only if we don’t become dependent on them. Hit factor is one metric that will highlight our dependencies, so that everyone on the project would know all of the critical information.
