Shak Schiff 
It’s a common assumption in the software project management world that, where progress is slow, adding human resources will accelerate activity. In reality, of course, nine women can’t make a baby in one month, and adding more hands to a late-running project can often make things even worse. Believe it or not, there is a general theory of this effect, which was summarized in 1975 by Fred Brooks in his pioneering popular account of the difficulties of large software projects, The Mythical Man-Month. Brooks referred to this effect – which becomes much worse for a complex human activity with people working closely together – as Brooks’ Law: ‘adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.’ Brooks gave a simple statement of the law, which assumes that you can’t split up an activity into smaller chunks: ‘Under certain conditions, adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.’
Understanding Brooks’ Law
Brooks’s Law stipulates that, ‘adding manpower to a late software project makes it later’. Beneath this simple pithy claim, couched in a humorous setting, is a generic truth about adding more individuals to projects of various types and in most industries. Why can more manpower make a project take longer?
Increased Communication Overheads
Increasing the number of people is arguably the single most likely reason an otherwise rewarding project will take longer than expected. The greater the number of people working on something, the more communication overheads you need to handle. For example:
- With two people, there is only one communication channel.
- With three people, there are three communication channels.
- With four people, there are six communication channels.
Note how the number of communication channels increases rapidly as more people are added, which in turn means that each team member spends more time communicating and less time being productive.
Synchronization Challenges
For bigger teams, there’s another problem: does everyone agree on what needs to be done, and is everyone working on the same task without double-ups? It’s easy for a small team all in the same office to have contact between everyone. But if you’re working on a distributed team and everyone isn’t at the same company, synchronizing tasks, meetings, status updates and check-ins takes up a lot of time that could be spent actually completing the project activity.
The Learning Curve
In software project management when new members need to get up to speed, they have to figure out where the project is at, learn the tools and processes, and be assimilated into the team’s institutional memory and dynamics. As a consequence, it takes some time for overall team productivity to recover from the loss of efficiency due to on-boarding a new member.
Real-World Examples
It’s not unusual for software project management to become even more delayed when you add bodies as a last-minute attempt to hit a deadline. The expectation that more hands will amplify velocity often has the opposite effect: more time gets spent on co‑ordination, and less on getting stuff done. Occasionally we get pulled in to help save these projects, after it’s already too late.
Conclusion
It may feel counterintuitive, but adding bodies to a project that is already falling behind can result in more delays. This is because adding more personnel to a project leads to more overheads in terms of communication, synchronization and the learning curve.
Increasing the number of people working on a project should be considered a last resort since it can compound rather than alleviate bottlenecks in delivery. There are other steps that can be taken before deciding to increase the number of personnel on a project. Improving project management, communication and processes can therefore help to mitigate some of the difficulties that come with increases in team size and a project’s scale.
Want to know more about how lean processes and good communication can accelerate and improve your product delivery? Get in touch today to discuss the details with our experts.
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