Rescuing a project by adding new people - does it work?
When a deadline is looming, many companies add people to the team to speed things up. But onboarding, coordination and lower initial productivity have hidden costs. When adding a new person actually helps - and how to do it wisely.
According to reports by The Standish Group, around 50% of IT projects overrun their schedule or budget, and 20% are cancelled altogether 🙁
That clearly makes it a fairly common problem 😮💨
The usual reaction to an approaching deadline
For many companies, the first thing that comes to mind when a deadline is inevitably about to be missed is to add new people to the team to speed up the work 👨💼👨💼👨💼
But is that really a good solution? 🤔
The hidden costs of adding new people
- 👉 a new person needs to be introduced to the project and get to know it - this takes days or weeks, depending on the scale of the project
- 👉 a new person has to learn the team’s way of working and find out in practice who is responsible for what and who makes which decisions - often the reality is quite different from the formal structure; for example, the actual leader may be someone other than the formal team leader
- 👉 for the reasons above, a new person will not reach 100% of their productivity on the project, which must be taken into account when planning. Otherwise we simply add another underestimate to the project schedule
- 👉 a larger team means additional coordination overhead, which takes up more time - at the very least the project manager’s, and at most every single team member’s. This is also a cost to factor into planning
- 👉 the more people we add to the team, the more the existing team gets involved in onboarding them - and then the pace of work slows down significantly
How to do it wisely
Despite the obstacles listed above, bringing an additional person into a project can pay off. You just have to do it wisely 🤓
So how?
- 👉 we must account for the additional overhead of onboarding a person in our schedule. From my experience, I would assume that person’s productivity drops from 100% to 80%, the project manager’s involvement increases by 15% and the team’s by 10%.
- 👉 the new person should be someone who has previously worked on other projects with at least half of the current team. This significantly reduces the cost of integrating a new team member
- 👉 for each new person there should be one person from the existing team who spends a few days intensively onboarding the “newcomer” into the project and the way of working. This must be included in the schedule
How does it work for you?
How does adding new people to the team work out in your experience? Does it actually save projects from missing their deadlines?
