Who This Article Is For
- Owners reconsidering action on repeatedly delayed projects
- Project leaders unsure whether adding members will help
- Team leaders improving delivery through better working methods
Examine Bottlenecks and Handover Costs Before Adding People to a Late Project
Use Brooks's law to examine coordination, onboarding, and project bottlenecks, then separate work or revise scope before treating staffing as the solution.
Published
Check the Delay and Handover Burden Before Adding People
Adding people to a late project can increase the work of sharing, teaching, and checking, putting completion further away. This is the concern expressed by Brooks's law.
Complex specifications, many stakeholders, and a slow ramp-up for newcomers make the concern especially relevant. Determine whether the missing resource is genuinely people. Delayed decisions, specification changes, and unclear responsibilities need their own remedies.
Locate where work stops. Misreading the bottleneck can make well-intended hiring create new confusion.
What Is Brooks's Law?
It describes how adding people to an already late project can make it later. Known from software development, the reasoning also concerns coordination-heavy planning, production, marketing, and improvement work.
Work rarely divides through headcount alone. Ten people cannot necessarily complete in one month what takes one person ten months. Some steps are sequential, require common context, or need coordination between owners.
| Assumption | What to consider |
|---|---|
| New people can divide the work immediately | Explanation and handover take time |
| The busiest projects benefit most from more staff | Those projects may struggle most to absorb them |
| A skilled person changes the outcome immediately | Even skilled people need context |
Two Reasons Delays Can Increase
Sharing and Checking Grow
More members mean more coordination about what is known, what is decided, and what changed.
A five-person team and a ten-person team have different numbers of possible conversations. Additional work can include:
- Progress meetings
- Sharing specification changes
- Clarifying responsibility boundaries
- Requesting reviews and handling returned work
- Correcting misunderstandings
Adding work capacity can therefore add meeting time instead.
Existing Members Must Help Newcomers Begin
New members need background, specifications, past decisions, roles, and tools. The people explaining these are often the already busy members.
Initially:
- Existing work pauses for explanation
- Newcomers take time to understand the whole
- Misunderstandings create corrections
- Overall progress can slow
Output can fall immediately after staffing increases, before any later benefit appears.
Warning Signs in a Project
Consider process problems beyond headcount when:
- Meetings increase without visible progress
- Questions and decisions concentrate on one person
- Each specification change creates rework
- Unclear boundaries cause duplication or omissions
- New members do not know what to prioritize
- Few people understand the whole despite an approaching deadline
If exhaustion comes from tangled coordination, adding people without changing that process addresses the wrong cause.
How to Recover
Identify the Source of Delay
Examine whether the problem is:
- Unsettled specifications
- Slow decisions
- Long review queues
- Unclear responsibility
- Frequently changing priorities
- Work concentrated on a few people
A blocked approval route calls for a shorter route. Frequent changes call for clearer change rules. The diagnosis determines the action.
Separate Work That Can Be Assigned Independently
When more people are necessary, avoid placing everyone directly into the delayed core. Options include:
- Keep the core team on essential functions
- Assign supporting documentation separately
- Develop test cases independently
- Separate data organization or migration preparation
Distinguish tightly coupled work from tasks that can proceed with less coordination. This reduces the burden on the existing team.
See using a WBS to define executable tasks for consistent task size, completion criteria, and ownership before handover.
Revisit Timing and Scope
Some projects need a scope or deadline decision before staffing. Attempting to preserve everything can delay everything. Establish:
- What is essential for this deadline?
- What can follow later?
- Where must quality be protected?
- Who has authority to decide?
Avoiding that discussion leaves the team carrying unrealistic expectations. Difficult projects particularly need explicit adjustment.
SpreadSite is a no-code website builder that lets you create, publish, and update a website from Google Sheets using ready-made templates.
To keep your project or service information clear on a website with simple updates, give SpreadSite a try!
Build a website with SpreadSite →
About the Author
Thank you for reading!
I develop and operate SpreadSite, a service for creating websites from spreadsheets.
It helps people with limited time and money communicate what makes their work appealing. Consider it if you need a website! SpreadSite
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Does the law apply only to software?
A: Coordination-heavy work in production, planning, operational improvement, and marketing can face similar burdens.
Q: What if we genuinely lack people?
A: Identify work that can be assigned independently. Supporting or separable tasks may help more quickly than placing newcomers in the central coordination-heavy work.
Q: When can extra members help?
A: Stable specifications, clear responsibilities, and useful handover materials make it easier for someone to begin without repeated clarification.
Q: What should I examine first in a late project?
A: Identify the blocked stage: execution, checking, approval, or specification decisions. Headcount alone cannot answer that question.
