Liquidity matrix – what is it and how might it help your team?

Over the years I’ve seen a number of places of work which suffer from the following, a team member leaves or is on holiday and he or she is the go to developer, the developer that’s the only person who really knows that topic or area and as a result you have to wait for them to return, lets face it I’m pretty sure this has happened to a huge percentage of us, so here is an idea to help with this:-

So for example say we take the following as an example:-

From the above we can figure out that Andy doesn’t know anything about the internal and external websites, perhaps he can be brought up to speed, also Andy is the only person who knows anything about the Deployment and the PowerShell scripts, that means he’s the bottleneck or however you want to put it, other developers should be brought up to speed so that he is not the only person with knowledge in that area, if he went on holiday or left then you have a glaring problem.

You can do this same will skills and this is much more common I have found, and yeah not everyone is keen to admit to not knowing much about a certain area but just reassure them that this is not what this matrix is for.

Maybe some of you will find this useful, hopefully it doesn’t show that your team rely on some people, and its good to share knowledge within your teams.