Q: My once-responsive project team has grown lately in terms of both numbers and bureaucracy. What formerly was a nimble and agile group is increasingly sluggish and slow—and much more concerned with process than with results. Is this an inevitable phase of the project life cycle?
A: What you are experiencing may be new to you, but it has probably plagued project management forever. The best analysis of this issue was set forth by a mid-20th century British philosopher named C. Northcote Parkinson in his brilliant little 1957 book Parkinson's Law and Other Studies in Administration [Ballantine Books],
Parkinson's Law is famous, most often crudely reduced to the aphorism: “Work expands to fill the time available to do it.” But in his book, Mr. Parkinson went much further than that, showing how work also expands in lockstep with the increase in the number of people in the organization. It's a short and readable book, which so clearly explains the dysfunction of organizations that experienced project managers will spend half their time laughing and the other half weeping.
We can fool ourselves into thinking that because the amount of work has grown, surely the number of workers must go up as well. But with his wry British humor, Mr. Parkinson shows how that thinking conflates cause and effect: Too often, it is not the work that's driving up the number of people, but the number of people that's driving up the amount of work.
Mr. Parkinson's milieu was the British civil service, but his law affects project management as well. My own introduction to the phenomenon came decades ago when I joined a multibillion-dollar project. The team had rapidly grown from about 40 to close to 100, but the project manager assured me that personnel growth had leveled off, the project was maturing and future team growth would surely be minor.
As the number of Googlers mushroomed, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made a conscious decision to increase not the size but the number of teams, allowing them to keep team size itself fixed at three.
When I left that project five years later, the headcount stood at 400. The number of deliverables hadn't changed, but the schedule had slowed, costs had ballooned and we all were suffering the inefficiencies of sluggish bureaucracy that Mr. Parkinson predicted.
Add It Up
As team size grows, project quality declines. But that has been known for decades. About the time that Mr. Parkinson put pen to paper, an irascible genius named Kelly Johnson was developing perhaps the finest aeronautical design group in the world. For decades, his U.S.-based Lockheed Skunk Works turned out some of the most innovative aircraft in history—the U-2 spy plane, the SR-71 Blackbird and the F-117 stealth fighter—and produced them with unsurpassed quality and speed.
To do that, Mr. Johnson created a list of 14 principles that ought to be required reading for any project manager. It's number three that resonates the most: The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people (10 percent to 25 percent compared to the so-called normal systems).
Other great firms apply this small team focus today. Buell Motorcycles, a division of Harley-Davidson, limits development teams to three people: a purchasing engineer, a design engineer and a quality engineer. And those three people are responsible for taking a product from conception all the way through production. Similarly, the search geniuses of Google believe in that same sort of triad. As the number of Googlers mushroomed, founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made a conscious decision to increase not the size but the number of teams, allowing them to keep team size itself fixed at three.
What's so sacred about keeping teams small? The advantages are many:
- Greater accountability: There's nowhere to hide on a three-person team.
- Simple, faster communication: As teams grow, they spread out. Interpersonal contact drops as distance grows, and miscommunications and disconnects rise.
- Increased clarity, cohesion and commitment: People know their mission, and their unique role in achieving that mission.
- More people doing, fewer people checking: The U.S. Army calls it the “tooth-to-tail ratio,” the proportion of actual fighters to support staff. As the “checkers” within a project grow in number, so do the inevitable paperwork, meeting agendas and e-mail traffic.
So far we've focused on quantity of people, but quality factors in as well, and in an odd way: The better your people, the more problems you're liable to have. That sounds odd, but all those good people you've brought want to have an impact, so they get involved. And the more involved they get—remember, these are good, conscientious people who want to make a difference—the more likely you'll see the pace of your project slow. PM
| Bud Baker, Ph.D., is a professor of management at Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, USA. Please send questions for Ask PM Network to [email protected]. |