Who has worked with whom
The first number to write down
If you do one thing from this site, do this. Four people, six pairs, ten minutes, and a date written next to the answer so the second count means something.
The people this page is about, and which of them have ever worked together
- 01The team's managerThree of this person's five working pairs
- 02The senior engineer
- 03The second engineer
- 04The designerShared with two other teams
- 05The QA engineer
five people · 10 possible pairs · 4 of them have worked on something together · 2 have only been in the same meeting · 4 have never done either
Five of the eight, and only the pairs that run between those five.
Home / Who has worked with whom
Before introducing another status meeting, it helps to view its reporting features and decide whether a clearer view of time and projects would answer the question first.
An independent source worth comparing with this example is Pew Research Center.
A four-person group counted in ten minutes, which is as small as this is worth doing
- 01The team's managerTwo working pairs, both through this person
- 02The senior engineerThe one pair that does not
- 03The second engineer
- 04The product manager
four people · 6 possible pairs · 3 of them have worked on something together · 1 has only been in the same meeting · 2 have never done either
Four of the eight people counted on this site. At four people there are six possible pairs, which is few enough to hold in your head and still worth writing down.
Everything else here is elaboration. This is the thing to actually do, and it is small enough that there is no good reason to postpone it.
Write down the people in your team. Write down every pair of them. Mark the pairs that have done a piece of work together in the last three months. Write the date next to the answer.
That is the whole exercise. For four people it takes ten minutes, for eight about twenty, and for twelve it takes an hour and is the most informative hour you will spend on the subject.
Doing it on paper first
Do it alone, roughly, before doing it properly. The rough version takes ten minutes, is certainly wrong in two or three places, and tells you whether the proper version is worth arranging.
Write the names in a column. Number them. Then write the pairs as numbers — one-two, one-three, one-four, two-three, two-four, three-four for a group of four — and go down the list asking the same question of each.
Asking it pair by pair rather than person by person is the only piece of technique on this page, and it matters. Going person by person produces each person's highlights and silently skips everything you do not immediately recall. Going pair by pair forces you to answer about the pairs you would not have thought of, which are the ones the exercise exists to find.
What you will notice while doing it
Three things happen to almost everybody during the first attempt.
- You will hesitate on several pairs and realise you are inventing the rule as you go. Stop and write the rule down, then start again. The note on what counts as having worked together has the one used here if you want to borrow it.
- You will find at least one pair you were sure existed and cannot actually point to anything for. These are usually two people who talk often and have never produced anything jointly. Mark it as a near-miss and move on; it is the cheapest one to fix later.
- You will find one person whose row is empty, and you will be surprised by who it is. It is rarely the quietest person. It is more often somebody competent and self-sufficient who has been given work they can do alone, and who nobody worries about.
The date
Write it down. This is the one instruction on this page that people skip and the one that makes the difference.
The number six means nothing. Six on the fourteenth of March, against five on the eleventh of December, with the same four people and the same rule, means something specific: one pair appeared, and you can name it and say what caused it.
Without the date and the rule, the second count is just another impression, and you will spend the conversation arguing about whether the two numbers were made the same way instead of about what to do.
After the first count
Pick one thing. Not a programme: one thing, in the next month, involving two named people who currently have no pair.
The last part of this site is a catalogue of the things that work, all of which are small and most of which cost nothing: give two people one deadline, rotate who writes the weekly note, send one person's work to one named other for review. Any of them will do. The point of starting with one is that when the next count is taken you will know what caused the change, which you will not if you changed six things at once.
Then show it to the team
The rough version is for you. The proper version should be shown to everybody it is about, with roles rather than names, and preferably in the meeting where you would otherwise have discussed how the team is doing.
Two things happen when you do. Somebody corrects a row, which improves the number. And several people discover that the thinness they had privately assumed was their own problem is the shape of the whole team, which is a relief rather than bad news.
A grid kept by one person becomes a private document about colleagues. The same grid shown to the eight people in it is a description of how the work is arranged, which is all it was ever meant to be.
And a reason to do it this week rather than next quarter
The count takes its value from the gap between measurements, so the first one is worth more the earlier it is made. A baseline taken today can be compared in April. A baseline taken in April cannot be compared until July, and by then the team will probably have changed shape for reasons unrelated to anything you did.