Why adding manpower to a late project is not a good idea
Parent Post
Brooks’ law states that
Brooks’ law states that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”.
This principle denotes that when it comes to various types of projects, adding more resources—especially more people—is often unhelpful and even counterproductive.
How to account for
How to account for Brooks’ law
Avoid assuming that adding more resources to a project will necessarily help. Instead, assess the situation to determine whether you should add resources.
Consider the following:
- How can adding more resources help the project?
- How can adding more resources harm the project?
If your main goal
If your main goal is to get the project done as fast as possible, add more people in order to increase productivity, even if this decreases the productivity of individual team members.
If a team of 2 people operates at 100% individual efficiency, their cumulative productivity is equivalent to 200%.
Adding another person reduces everyone’s efficiency to 80%, but increases the team’s overall productivity to 240%.
Brooke’s Law can be
Brooke’s Law can be expanded in 3 main ways:
- It can be applied to endeavors other than software projects.
- It can be applied to negative outcomes other than delays.
- It can be applied to resources other than manpower.
Rationale behind Brooks’ lawBrooks’
Rationale behind Brooks’ law
Brooks’ law is based on the idea that adding more people to a project doesn’t mean that it will be completed faster, due to various issues, such as:
- Teaching time spent by people who are already working on the project must spend in order to train newcomers.
- Learning time spent by new people to become productive after joining the project.
- Communication overhead, spent on communication rather than work, and which generally rises rapidly as people are added to a project.
- Limited divisibility, is the limited ability to divide certain tasks into partitions that can be handled by separate people.