How to Make a Late Project Later

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Most people think that throwing more resources at a problem solves it.

In reality, it often makes the problem worse.

You now have new people you need to train, your communication gets more complicated, and what do you even let them do?

Let’s take a look at them in detail and see what you can do instead:

Your project is late, now what?

We’ve all been there. You’re halfway through an 8-month project and you realize that at the current pace, it won’t be done in time.

As discussed in previous newsletters, you have 4 constraints that you can play with: time, money, quality, and scope. In today’s knowledge working world, time and money are closely related as man hours are the vast majority of the budget.

But don’t be fooled: time refers to throughput time, not hours spent.

And that’s often where your sponsor will try to find a solution. If the scope and quality are fixed (we can NOT ship without dark mode!), you have two variables remaining. You can extend the deadline, or use more money.

Once committed, moving a deadline hurts. It looks bad in the leadership team, in the media, and towards the client. But in most organizations, it’s not impossible to “find” a bit of money if the pressure is on.

So what does your steering committee suggest? Here’s some extra cash, get some more people and get it done.

They think they’re doing you a great favor, but they’re making the problem worse. Funny how that works, right?

Enter Brooks's law

Back in 1975 (!) IBM software architect Fred Brooks wrote what would become a timeless classic: The Mythical Man Month. While aimed at software development and almost 50 years old, I refer to this book often with clients in many different industries.

Brooks explains that there are three main reasons why adding resources makes matters worse:

1. New people need to be onboarded

2. More people add complexity

3. Tasks are hard to split up

Let’s look at them in a bit more detail.

The ramp-up

When new people join an existing project, you have two things to train them on.

1. The context of the project and the work done so far

2. What they’ll need to do their own task

The added problem with a project is that the people capable of doing this are often your most senior and/or productive team members. It doesn’t just mean that new people are not productive on day one. It actually means the productivity of others will go down in the beginning too!

Added complexity

Remember the Telephone game from your primary school days? You all stand around in a circle and whisper something around. By the time the 10th person says it out loud, it has nothing to do with what the first person started with.

Brooks probably loved this game when he was little. And while most executives get cold shivers from playing such games at a “teambuilding retreat” it might not be a bad idea.

Jokes aside, more people means more complexity. You’ve probably seen this drawing before:

We don’t even have to go into too much detail here. I bet you’ve seen this happen before. More people means more overhead, more meetings, and more need for coordination.

The sad reality is that as team size increases, individual productivity decreases. That’s why startups run circles around government projects.

Task visibility

Some tasks are easy to split up. But in most complex projects, it’s not easy to carve out a specific task or break up a work package into two pieces.

This is where knowledge work differs from things you can physically separate. With physical tasks, you can process in parallel. Two people picking orders in a warehouse will be twice as fast as one person, given the right tools & process.

But creative work and complex problem-solving don’t work like that. You can’t just give away half of a problem.

What you should do instead

Have you heard of the Bermuda plan? It’s where you take 90% of your team and send them Bermuda, so the remaining people can finish the job.

We’ve had a prime example of this at Twitter last winter: firing the vast majority of engineers and shipping features faster than ever.

But if you’re not as ruthless as Musk, there’s hope too. It obviously all starts with a realistic deadline and a team to match that. Having more people at the start is better than adding them later.

And if you have to add people, make sure you can isolate clear tasks for them to work on. Instead of adding a 5th specialist to a group that’s working well to do “all of it faster”, isolate a part of the work and give that to someone else.

Testing or documentation is a great example - let someone else do just that instead of adding that 5th engineer.

Final tip: standardize your onboarding. The coming and going of people in a project team is inevitable. Instead of winging it every time, document how you bring on new people and get them up to speed using an SOP.

That’ll do for this week,
Jasper

PS: The best way to keep Brooks’s law at bay is to create a realistic plan and align your stakeholders before you get started. If you’d like to get better at that, sign up for the waiting list for the Project Management Unraveled course here.