So do you have any co-workers or teammates who horde tasks and don't share knowledge? I hate those kind of people. Everytime I bring it in team's retrospective and that one asshole remains quite during the whole meeting, agrees to everything and continues to horde tasks again in the future. That affects the team performance and causes to form a single point of failure and recovery which is bad when working in a team. Share your experiences.

I've had very similar experiences. It is very annoying. I haven't figured out much of a way to stop it from happening but a lot of times the person will eventually get burnt out and start to spread the stuff around more.

That is what I am expecting. In the end, the one who suffers is the team.

We have a hoarder that never communicated and hardly delivered. It caused way too much friction. At the end, he decided to move on. Lack of communication, clueless bosses, and ridiculous amount of work sums up my past year. I guess the best way to deal with such people is to ask them their progress on each task they're handling and keep track of it. You need an alpha nerd boss for being able to do this I guess.

One person can have a serious impact on the team - good or bad. Your manager should fix this fast.

The guy is leaving and manager is being replaced. But the ridiculous amount of work and not being in touch with reality will persist regardless of the people. It is the culture of the organization

In an agile environment, we don't have any real notion of a manager. The team has the most say in all matters. While the team lead does have some authority, he plays the good guy and does nothing. I guess I just have to wait and see how this pans out.

Then lobby behind the scenes like hell. That's my strategy in such environment. Frustration builds and explodes in the wrong money's sometimes.

Do you pair at all? If not, you could suggest it as a way to spread knowledge without taking the work away from this guy. Hoarders tend to lack in confidence. They stick to what they know and not let others see their process because they're either afraid of losing job security or of having their process/ code criticized. If you pair in a non judgemental and supportive way, he'll be less reticent in sharing the knowledge. The big challenge is hoarders tend to be the strongest opposers to pairing.

We use a work in progress limit, i.e. 1 task in progress, if it's not fully developed and awaiting review/testing, you don't pick up something else. Seems to work well.

We need to enforce one task at one time I guess. This is what I am going to work on.