Ham And Eggs

The Joke

A pig and a chicken are grabbing burritos at La Brasera, when the chicken has a spark of inspiration.

"Hey, pig! Whad'ya say you and I open a food cart?"

"That's a great idea," says the pig. "What should we call it?"

"Hmmmmm..." says the chicken, scratching his beak. "I got it! We'll call it.....Ham and Eggs!"

"I don't know," says the pig, wiping salsa from his snout.

"What's not to know? It's a no-brainer! It's brilliant," says the chicken. "It's low startup. We have everything we need to pull it off, and we'll be making money wing over hoof in no time!"

"It's a good idea," says the pig. "It's just that...You'd be contributing, but only I'd be...committed."

The Lesson

Individuals' different levels of responsibility and accountability in a project often necessitate different levels of participation, especially when the project needs to move forward quickly.

This basic idea is built into Agile Project Management models, such as Scrum to delineate roles between committed, core members of the project team, and active contributors who do not share equally in the ultimate stakes of success/failure of the project. In such models, the roles of participants are split between "pigs" and "chickens," with pigs composing the active project team, and chickens playing an active, but moderated, role in project planning. "Roosters," who have nothing to contribute to the project but vocalizations, are ideally not part of the project team in any capacity (although their vocalizations are still audible from the other side of the fence).