Using Brooks Law to help grow with intention and remain productive

When a project is running late, or we have too much to do, we often wish we had a bigger team. The hope is that more people give us more capacity to complete the work. It doesn’t always work like that.

Adding more people makes projects even later

In his 1975 book Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks argued the exact opposite. Brooks’ law states that: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” There are three keys reasons why this happens, especially on complex projects:

🐌 Ramp up time — it takes time for a new member of a team to be productive. Supporting people to get up to speed also diverts resources from people already working on the project.

📢 Communication overhead — the more people you have the more time you need to spend communicating with each other.

➗ Lack of divisible tasks — in complex projects it isn’t always possible (or wise) to divide up a task.

Brooks himself admitted this in an oversimplification. The quality and experience of the people being added to a project make a huge difference. It might be that the project isn’t late, we were just over-optimistic in the planning.

The challenge of communication overhead in all teams

Although Brooks worked on software development, something about Brooks’ law really resonates with my own experience. I’ve worked in small organisations, where when I joined there were just a handful of people. Communication overhead was low. We could all talk to each other, we were in the same office and it was easy to keep up with what people were working on.

As the organisation grew, the number of connections grows exponentially. The illustration below shows the challenge of this, even within small teams. Moving from a team of 6 to a team of 8 almost doubles the number of connections and relationships within the team.

Growing with intention

Whether it is a small organisation that is growing or a team within an organisation that is getting larger, it is vital to grow with intention and reflecting on Brooks’ law can help us with this.

🚢 Give your inductors the time they need — I’ve seen great onboarding plans for people across many organisations. What I haven’t seen as often is space for those people helping get them up to speed. If someone is taking on a buddy role or supporting people in other ways, you have to account for the impact on their project priorities, if they are going to do the work properly.

🌱 Grow before it becomes critical — this can be hard but often we recruit at the point of crisis, rather than before it. If you know you’re going to need new people, don’t put it off. Recruitment always takes longer than you think and is also a productivity drain

🍵 Plan for communication overheads — we need to think not just about how we need to communicate (more often? smaller groups?) but also about the impact that this will have on productivity. You will not double the output of your team by doubling the number of people, so plan for this.