Creating Faster Cheaper Projects

Johanna Rothman offered this advice yesterday, in her weblog Managing Product Development.

"If you really want to perform projects faster and/or cheaper, start them earlier."

Her proposal includes running with a smaller team.

Can't say I agree. Having worked in both software development and the AEC industry, I can see the point of having a smaller team. Fewer conversation lines does reduce the chance of miscoordination and therefore breakdowns. As Johanna points out, there's also likely to be less multi-tasking, and more organizational flexibility from this approach. On the other hand, as the team size decreases the opportunities for innovation and learning will decrease along with the decrease in total skills available. There are three other issues that Johanna is missing.

1. The accumulated investment of working longer on a project will raise the total costs. If you examine the extremes of 1 month with 10 people and and ten months with 1 person you'll see the issue. (For the sake of the example assume the work can be done as described and other variables stay the same.) In the first case I pay ten people for one month and I get my project done and start earning a return on the investment. Total invested: 10 person-months salary. In the second case I make my first investment in one month's work 10 months before I can reap a benefit. The following month I make another investment needing to wait 9 months before a return, etc. Total invested: 55 person-months.
2. The longer the project takes the more likely you will need to deal with changing client and market requirements. In other words long projects have more changes and more cost.
3. Client need and capacity availability. If you are at all market focused, then you need to respond to what is asked of you. You must also deal with the facticity that people are already busy fulfilling promises made on other projects.

Here's my operating principle:

Promise the end conditions at the first responsible moment and then commit to all the intermediate actions and start at the last responsible moment.

Example: The client wants something in 5 months. You don't have the people ready for 1 month. There's 10 person months of work to do.

The way I would do this project acting as the project manager is to delay the start even further to get the project in a condition where once people start their tasks they can work on them 'til they are finished. So, delay the start by another month, put 4 people on it working for 2 1/2 months, and deliver 2 weeks early. The invested time is kept low and there's time at the end for something unforeseen. Everyone wins!

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