I did not experience this first hand, but I was part of huge project where the company was shifting from one sterilization method to another. This project involved every single department and it was really a company wide effort. I'm sure you can imagine that when you have to shift sterilization methods, the sterility team plays a huge role in the testing. It just so happened that the SME for the sterilization team was leaving the company in the middle of the key sterility testing that was to be done for validation. The project took a small hit in losing its expert on the sterilization methods. However, the change in terms of timeline or tasks did not change. The project manager was a really smart guy - he had over 30 years of PM experience. Initially, he did not rely on just one person for sterility expertise but rather a group of people, the SME being one of them. So really, the project was not affected too much as there were other team members who stepped up and took on the tasks that the SME had. No one can really account for an abrupt change in the project especially personnel change. I think the PM for this project really planned perfectly and smartly in that making sure that there wasn't just one person that he could rely on.

Yes, you have raised a very good point, I experienced that when I was working on a project for a company called SEL. My team consisted of 4 people and we were electrifying a community really closed to our installations. It is worth it of mentioning that this company was small and everyone knew each other and what we were all working on. However, for some reason 2 people from the quality department had found a better job and left the company. When the noticed administration about it, the Project manager made the decision to change one of our team members to quality department to compensate for the left of the 2 members. Our project got delayed for like a month or so and the amount of work that we had to do was more intense when compared to before.

Let me know what you think!
Sincerely,
Roberto Pineda.

While working at General Dynamics Electric Boat in the electrical engineering dept, there was a shortage of software engineers. Whenever someone finds out that there was a software engineer with any kind of experience in electrical engineering, they usually were courted and eventually, they go to another department. While a director of a another department cannot "take" away one of your team members, they can offer him a better situation and that person can leave. I was managing a series of R&D projects and needed a software engineer to work on a project that another software engineer who recently left came up with. The previous software engineer designed the project, pitched it to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and had everyone excited about the idea. NRL ran with the idea and got us funding for the idea. That software engineer went to another department. I ended up with all this money sitting around and no work being done and no one with the skills to do the work. I went to my management and explained the problem and told them I was going head hunting. I approached friends in the same company in other dept. and told them about the project. They found it interesting. I went back to my management and explained that if they want this huge contract, they would have to speak to my friend and court them appropriately. My timeline and task were not affected due to me finding someone else to do the work. I wish employees didn't have to be taken but it does benefit the employee because they get to choose which job they want to work on and usually get something out of it.

Most associations have a chain of command which relegates obligations and duties to different gatherings and people to achieve the authoritative mission. Regularly spoke to as a hierarchical tree the division of work force and duties called an authoritative graph which demonstrates the administrator and staff fit as a fiddle with the leader of the association and their staff at the top, upheld by different gatherings and subgroups with distinct of utilitarian names, for example, bookkeeping, faculty, lawful, and so on each of these offices or departments may have subdivisions, et cetera. Most organizations have a hierarchical guide or tree to delineate both assignments/duty and sending of work force.

I was not part of a team that had a team member removed to work on another project completely. In my experience it usually isn't a complete removal but the individual that is chosen to work on another project has to divide their time between their core responsibilities and the new project that they were selected to work on. This can cause problems in resources and can affect the person's work if the workload becomes to much then the quality of work does decrease. The main downside to splitting the time up between different projects is that individual's miss out on key meetings, such as weekly update meetings on where the project team is headed and rationales behind the changes being made on projects. This is because they are to busy working on another task. On the other hand, I have seen individual's mainly in either rotational programs or co-ops be placed into projects for a short time and upper management requires them to participate in the project. This could result in a resource drainage rather than benefit because at times a lot of time is spent training and getting them up to speed on the organizational breakdown and where they fit into the system. However, after all the training and explanation they usually leave within a couple months and this is a frustrating aspect of the flip side of having someone forced onto a project team.

At my current job, I have experienced a situation where a vital team member was temporality taken from my quality group to work in another project within the company. The individual chosen happen to be the most senior member of my group who everyone turned to when there was an issue; my manager quickly learned that losing him was a big deal. Issues quickly built up and the individual members of my team had to plan for a lot more time working out solutions that would have almost been trivial days before. Although he was only assigned to another internal project for 3 weeks, my manager responded by hiring two new employees to our group to help with the immediate work load and be better prepared if a similar situation were to occur again in the future. This hiring stint recently looks like it was a good idea because one of my team members has applied to dental school and may be leaving the company within the next few weeks. This time, my team has ample people who have now been training for a while and are familiar with the roles and regulations that the FDA requires so the transition should be much smoother should it occur.

From my experience, I am split between two departments, but I directly report to one. When the department that I am hired doesn't have a major project in the works, I am sent to the quality department to help them with their projects. I do not deal with project managers in particular, but I have two managers that i report to. There is a lot of communication between both departments to ensure that deadlines don't interfere with each other.

This is a really interesting topic to discuss as this type of situation often happens in a workforce. During my co-op experience, I was a part of the huge transfer project in which my company acquired another small medical device company. In this project, many departments collaborated as it was huge acquisition and needed a team effort. One of the major tasks is to evaluate the suppliers of the existing company and get them transferred onto our company. One of the SME on Supplier Quality needed to be transferred to another critical project. The Project Manager was a smart and as a result he asked the upper management to ask the resource from the Global Quality Team. Few training with respect to the specific project was required, but overall the new Quality Engineer was able to catch up fast. Due to many years of experience as the PM, he was easily able to acquire the correct resource for the project. All in all, this situation often happens in the industry and the PM must be ready to find the right resource for the project.

I have had a similar situation to yours where one team member was replaced by multiple. Do you think it is a good practice for companies to hire more than the needed staff by one or two people ?

From the previous discussions we have figured out that a team must be set up in a way such that each and every member should know the responsibility of every member of the project. This is one way to help the project to move ahead even at the state of absence of any member. We have discussed about it a lot. This helps in proper interaction and integration of the team members. This will lead to the proper success. So when a team is set up in that way then even the absence of a most important team member would be compensated.

I have been in a similar situations Roberto. One one of my projects as an intern I was assigned to a team of 5 with 3 engineers and 1 other intern. Due to the urgency of another project the second intern was pulled from my project team, leaving a great deal of additional responsibility on each of the members. This was of course difficult, but the team understood and all work was divided appropriately to accommodate for being down a member.

There was an instant when one of our lead Engineer was removed from our team. This really pushed our timeline of our project back several week since we had to evaluate and assign his tasks to another member. The project also missed his expertise on certain topics. At the end, he was asked to work on both project simultaneously.

I had not gone thru the experience yet however I would imagine that if the team is not adequately prepared as Hiren stated, then that could be difficult to overcome. The timeline will get pushed back if there is a reasonable justification as to why the schedule needs to be pushed back. If the deadline is critical to the business then the deadline will remain as is. Action items will also always get pushed around or split amongst each team member which is bound to happen. What would be best is to prepare for such events early on in order to circumvent any issues that may arise later which could be detrimental to the completion of the project.

The risk management plan becomes a very important part of such situations. Having a substitute member trained on essential skills performed by a key player in the team is important. Also having appropriate contingency plans helps. Having identified each team member's contribution and skill set correctly is important for HR to make sure that suitable corrective action can be taken. 

Hiring a temporary replacement, hiring a consultant or having another team member take over the tasks are all possible options. 

The last option would of course be to re-examine the project plan and accept the unavoidable delay. 

I also think that task transfer is very important even for the temporary unavailabilities of team members. A systematic procedure of task transfer set up by HR will help to minimize delays.