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| Is there room for an extra person without disrupting the others? Plan for it. |
The common management mantra is that when you want to speed things up
you need to hire more people. This is well known to not actually be true,
however, it seems to be the main form of common wisdom passed on to new
managers and project managers.
The reasons why it is not true is basically the time and skillsets
required for the stage of the project/work.
At the early stages you will need relatively few but experienced people
who can adequately define user needs, production needs, organisational
planning, scheduling, budgeting, etc. This is an intensive phase in the life of
a project.
Bringing on an extra person or two is more likely to slow things down
than speed them up at this stage. Basically you would be asking already very
busy people to not only take time out to handover work, but they would have to
invest considerable amounts of time to educating those people and bringing them
up to speed.
During the development phase of products and projects you will need to
bring on people in order to deliver the work packages that have already been
decided. Bringing on the planned amount of people is good, but there is a limit
to bringing on extra unplanned people due to the requirements for packaging up
and managing the work.
Also, as a manager you should be thinking about the root cause of
delays. For example, is the project/product scope too complex, does the
capability of the team match the skills required (I often see this one going
wrong), did you allocate an artificial deadline for commercial reasons not
linked back to the expected delivery schedule, and so on.
The moral of the story is that if you do bring on extra people then you
should plan for it explicitly – don’t just assume it will work.
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