We all know that nine women cannot make a baby in one month.
When developing a project schedule, projected duration can be calculated asestimated effort divided by full time equivalent resources multiplied by
some P or “rho” factor of productivity usually a fraction between six and
eight tenths. According to this formula, given an unlimited supply of resources, any
project could be done tomorrow. Of course in real life, we don’t usually have an unlimited supply of
resources. And there are costs of on boarding per resource, and
collaboration. So even if we did have unlimited supply, we probably would
fail some financial constraint in that staffing model. But we need to look at the work itself to determine how many resources can
be employed concurrently to get work done in parallel. What real and
assumed dependencies require work to be done sequentially? What can
overlap to allow more resources to be productive at the same time? And
finally, what design decisions have we made that impose constraints on our
parallelism? If sooner is important, then you may have to design this baby so that nine
women can make it in one month.