Projects are like Plutonium: compress them too much and they blow up

Today’s Dilbert cartoon makes fun of project compression. The pointy-haired boss has a 300 man-day project and has just hired 300 people to complete it in one day. He’s telling them they will be fired tomorrow after the project is done.

Aside from the comment on modern high-tech employment (hire and fire, over and over), this strip reminded me of a famous quote from The Mythical Man Month, Fred Brooks’ tongue-in-cheek analysis of the fallacies of project compression. In the book, Brooks made the point that nine women cannot make a baby in one month, no matter how well managed they are.

As a long-time project manager, I am forever reminding clients of the 9-month rule. Every time you add a body, you geometrically increase interfaces. These interfaces (speaking, listening, reading, writing, and most of all, understanding) are human and by definition imperfect. At some point, and usually pretty early in the process, compressing a project timeline by adding bodies increases confusion and often makes things worse.

Good project managers spend a lot of time managing expectations. When establishing timelines and resource loading, don’t forget to plan for the inevitable requests for project compression. Determine what tasks can be parallelized, find places (usually back-end reporting) where extra bodies won’t gum up the works, and always, always manage user expectations politely but firmly.

--- Jeff Klein, COO, Documentation Strategies Inc.