Bulldozer00's Blog

“Adding people to a late project makes it later” – Frederick Brooks

If an underway project is perceived as a schedule buster (and it usually is if managers are thinking of hurling more bodies into the inferno) then this famous Brooksian quote is true. However, if the project’s tasks are reasonably well defined, loosely coupled, and parallelized to the extent they can be, then adding people to a late project may actually help it finish earlier – without severely degrading quality.

Alas, the bigger the project, the less likely it is to be structured well enough so that adding people to it will speed up its completion. Not only is it harder to plan and structure larger projects, the people who get anointed to run bigger projects are more likely to be non-technical managers who only know how to plan and execute in terms of the generic, cookie-cutter, earned-value sequence of: requirements->design->code->test->deliver (yawn). Knowledge and understanding of any aspect of the project at the lower, more concrete, project-specific, level of detail that’s crucial for success is most likely to be absent. Bummer.