Who has worked with whom
The manager in the middle of everything
A count where most pairs include the same person is a measurement of the manager's calendar as much as of the team. What to read from it and what not to.
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
Where projects cross several roles, teams can open the current service page to make hours and handoffs visible enough for a useful capacity discussion.
For further reading outside this collection, see material published by Our World in Data.
Six of the eight, drawn so that every pair in the sub-group includes one person
- 01The team's managerEvery working pair in this sub-group includes this person
- 02The senior engineer
- 03The designerShared with two other teams
- 04The data analyst
- 05The product managerWrites the brief everybody reads
- 06The QA engineer
six people · 15 possible pairs · 5 of them have worked on something together · 2 have only been in the same meeting · 8 have never done either
Six of the eight people counted on this site, with the seventh and eighth left out so the hub is visible on its own.
Five of the six working pairs on this team include the manager. Drawn on its own, as in the panel above, the sub-group around them is a hub with five spokes and two stray connections that do not reach it.
The number is easy to misread in both directions, and the misreadings lead to different bad decisions, so it is worth going slowly.
What it does not mean
It does not mean the manager is withholding work. The commonest cause of a hub is that work arrives centrally and is distributed centrally, which is what distributing work means. Every individual act of assignment is correct.
It does not mean the manager is bad at delegating. Delegation transfers a task from the manager to one person, and it creates a pair with the manager. A manager who delegated everything perfectly would have eight spokes and no rim.
It does not mean people dislike each other. Two people with no pair between them have usually never had an occasion to have one. The absence is structural and gets read as personal, which is how a measurement problem turns into a morale problem.
What it does mean
Three things, all of them structural.
- The team has a single point of coordination, and therefore a single point of delay. Any exchange between two spokes either waits for the hub or does not happen. On a busy week the hub's calendar is the team's clock speed.
- The team's working knowledge is held in one place. Not the documented knowledge — the operational kind: who is close to finishing, who is stuck, who said something in passing that will matter next month. The hub has all of it and nobody else has any of it.
- The team is one departure away from being a list of individuals. This is the reading that matters most and the one that gets least attention, because it describes a risk rather than a problem.
The number to watch
The useful figure is not how many pairs the manager is in. It is how many pairs exist that do not include them.
Here it is one, out of a possible twenty-one among the other seven. One is very low. Five would be ordinary for a team of this size. The figure moves for reasons you can cause, which is why it is a better instrument than the total: the total is mostly a function of how much work there is, while the pairs that bypass the hub are a function of how the work is arranged.
Watching it also protects against the perverse version of improvement. A manager who sets out to raise the total count will do it by starting more collaborations, and the fastest way to start a collaboration is to be in it. The total goes up, the hub gets denser, and nothing has been fixed.
How a hub is unwound
Not by the hub stepping back. Removing the manager from the middle of a sparse network removes the only route between most of the people in it, and the exchanges that used to happen through them now do not happen at all. Everybody reports more autonomy and the work gets slower.
It is unwound by adding lines, one at a time, deliberately. Pick two spokes whose work touches at some point in the next month and give them one thing that needs both of them, with a date and without the manager in it. Then another two. Four of those in a quarter is a realistic pace, and it moves the bypass figure from one to five.
The slower, more durable version is to change where work arrives. If every piece of work is handed to one person by the manager, every collaboration starts at the hub by construction. If some work arrives at a pair, the pair is created by the arrival. This is what a rotation, a shared on-call duty or a jointly-owned area actually does, and it is why those produce pairs when a social event does not.
What a hub costs the hub
The costs listed above are costs to the team. There is a fourth and it is paid by one person.
Being the only route means being interrupted by everybody, holding eight people's context, and having a calendar that is the team's limiting factor. It is experienced as being busy and necessary, which is tolerable for a while and corrosive over a year.
It also makes leave expensive. A hub who takes a fortnight either stops the team or does a fortnight of coordination in advance, which is why hubs take less leave and why the week they come back is the worst week of their quarter.
None of that appears in any measure of how the team is doing.
One honest caveat
A hub is not always worth unwinding. If the eight people genuinely do eight separate things for eight different consumers, the manager is correctly the only connection and adding lines between them would be manufacturing coordination that nothing needs. The note on when a team is correctly just a list sets out how to tell, and it is worth reading before spending a quarter on this.