Hopefully, we have all come to the conclusion that adding people to a late project makes it later; however, I am surprised how many managers and developers still feel this is a good idea. One of my favorite quotable quotes is:

9 women do not make a baby in 1 month

I have talked before about balanced teams, but having correctly sized balanced teams is also important. If a team grows too large the overhead cost of communication, training, and coordination grows exponentially.

So what questions can we ask ourselves before adding additional resources onto a project?

Is this a temporary resource problem?

Many companies accidentally over staff themselves during situations where they legitimately need more people but on a temporary time frame. Adding permanent staff during these feeding frenzies is dangerous because the possible outcomes are never pretty:

• Projects are overstaffed to “keep people busy”
• Creates feast and famine experiences in work loads
• Always in a hire-then-fire state (creates bad company blood)

What is the communication cost?

If we bring extra resources there are a number of questions we can ask about how we will weigh the cost of communication:

• Will the people physically be in the office or remote?
• Is our spoken language also their primary language?
• What modes of communication are we limited to (email only, documents, phone…)?

Can we realign expectations?

In my eyes, this is how 90% of these temporary problems are solved.

Ask yourself, “Is this deadline really a deadline or just a made up one?” Unless your company has been running commercials announcing the deadline, it would be a good guess that this milestone or deadline is really just a fabricated placeholder in someones timeline. Can that expectation be moved slightly instead of asking for forgiveness when your late project become later.

How much time will we lose before we gain?

As the saying goes, “Two steps forward, one step back”, but in many cases ramp up time for additional resources is the first nail in the coffin for you project. There will always be a cost to new employees, so you can not always use it as an excuse not to bring on new blood – but is at the end of a project when you are the busiest the best time?

Be very leery when bringing people into a late project – it might just be the death of your project.

So Jurgen just tagged me on the “How Did I Get Started In Software” meme. I thought it would be fun to play along (because everyone enjoys talking about themselves). Here we go:

How old were you when you started programming?

I was a slow starter, 19 – freshman year of college. I barely knew how to run a computer, as I originally started school with the intent to graduate with a degree in sociology and become something like a social worker. When a buddy gave me a crapped out Apple LC 475, the rest is history. I must have tinkered with that computer for 20 hours a day flipping files in attempts to understand how it worked. As a result, I enrolled in a few CS classes.

How did you get started in programming?

The first CS class I ever took was Fortran 302. Don’t ask me how I ended up in that class as an intro, but calculating base 2’s was way over my head at the time. I dropped that class and went into a nice and easy C++ 101 course.

What was your first language?

C++ using the Borland 3.0 DOS IDE – it was nothing short of being magically painful.

What was the first real program you wrote?

Gosh, aside from common college assignments, I think the first *real* program I wrote would have been some FileMaker Pro databases and accompanying scripts.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

C++, Lisp, Java, C#, Objective C, Small Talk…too many to count except PHP and Ruby. (Need to learn PHP, too lazy to learn Ruby right now)

What was your first professional programming gig?

Although I did have tech desk like jobs before, I would consider Microsoft my first real programming gig. I was a clueless punk, so I honestly have no clue how I got on this team, but I landed an internship on a small team aiding the .NET framework team during its pre-alpha construction.

I worked with some brilliant people and eventually graduated to working on some tools for the Visual Studio team. The projects eventually died a slow and horrible death, but I worked on an internal NDoc alternative and a GUI ORM mapping tool. I sincerely don’t know if I would be at the level I am today without the timely guidance of my elders (thanks Steve and Mark).

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Don’t know – I think one can take many paths in life and be equally as happy. But I do enjoy my job and skills…

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Be humble, and never stop learning from others.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?

Creating the GUI interface for my MAME arcade machine.

Next one…
I’m tagging these people: Russell Ball and Alvin Ashcraft.