It Takes 9 Months to have a Baby
I think it was Merlin Mann in a recent interview who said the old adage – “It takes 9 months for a woman to have a baby… but throwing another 9 women at the problem won’t make the baby happen any faster.”
That’s an interesting statement both for project managers and aspiring entrepreneurs. A good part of the skill (and probably luck) of successful enterprise is understanding how to distribute the right resources effectively across the problem to achieve successful outcomes. One designer too many spoils the broth… or was that developer? The point is that every person comes with an organisational overhead.
The real cost of adding another team member are their wages, their software/hardware, consumables, their training to get up to speed, the supervision in the training process to avoid catastrophic error or misdirection, and their recruitment… the gamut of everything before they achieve the status of autonomous well-oiled facet of your enterprise. They have to learn the culture, the hierarchy and the new ways of doing business.
The problem obviously becomes the true cost of hiring extra manpower… a cost that may have made you slip further behind the project timeline. So you hire a few new developers… and get those overheads, too… until at a certain point you realise that employing more manpower is sending your project backwards.
I like the baby metaphor because everybody understands it intuitively. We all know that 10 women will still take 9 months to produce that baby, come what may. Our challenge is to impregnate and deliver several babies with several mothers working out just the right foetus-to-mother relationship as we progress. We don’t want an extra mother getting in our way or an extra foetus bouncing around the floor.
If we can encourage all 10 mothers to have healthy babies in 9 months our job was successful. The product ships. The game is on. I’ll see you at the starting post.
