Knowing your bus number

Have you ever considered the various risks facing your start-up, including the risks caused by not sharing information widely across your team?

What will happen if a key person “gets hit by a bus”, or a distracted ride share driver in downtown San Francisco? Let’s face it team members can very easily go AWOL and abandon a project.

Early stage companies with small teams face these risks every day. Companies led by solo founders are most at risk. I think it’s important for teams of all sizes understand and where possible mitigate these risks.

Project Managers refer to bus number as the number of team members whose loss would place a project in jeopardy. If four team members are key to the success of a project, the bus number is four. Lose these four and the project will likely face significant risks.

Lower numbers are undesirable. A bus number of 1 means that the loss of a single team member will jeopardize the project. The higher the number, the better.

Take an example of a 10x engineer who writes critical components of code for your start-up, but works alone and doesn’t share or document his work. We all praise these ‘rock stars’ but we don’t readily acknowledge the risks that they pose to the company.

From experience, I strongly advocate for a whole team approach to running a project. This model strives to promote collaboration and break down isolation. Team members develop an understanding and appreciation of their colleagues’ work, and they share knowledge by cross-training and documenting work-processes. The net effect: they will be confident and willing to go beyond their jobs and step in if a team member “gets hit by a bus”.

All aboard!