Avoid making people Indispensable

Every individual in a team has a important role to play, but in the interest of individual, project and organization, leaders should not allow people to become indispensable. Lots of career articles have been written about “How to make yourself Indispensable..” the tips like doing more than expectation is essential for professional growth but it should not let person become indispensable. The important part is we should motivate people to become more knowledgeable, productive, friendly and professional but not indispensable.

Indispensability can create issues like 

• Poor Team Productivity , the person become too busy and as a result there may be many tasks kept waiting ,and because of his queue other may not be able to start their activities
• Create Risk for project timeline, if the person is not available because of any reason it puts project timelines on risk
• Monotonous work, as he can only do some of the work, people keep coming to him only for the same work.

Some of the measures Project team can take to avoid Indispensability

• Continuous knowledge sharing, team should create environment of knowledge sharing. 
• Task rotation, we should keep rotating people between modules, so there should be more than one developer who codes for one use case.
• Educate team to become more professional, the growth in career happens by sharing knowledge not by keeping secrets.
• Put process in place, process like one codes and other does the review, one codes and other fixes the bug, peer programming and group design can institutionalize the knowledge sharing.