The maths behind the diminishing return of added resources April 25, 2007
Posted by Wille in Investing & Economics, Management, Software Development.trackback
A former colleague that has a degree in maths stumbled across my previous post was kind enough to provide me with a formula for how the diminishing return on added personnel on a project works expressed in mathematical terms:
Project productivity = N*I – Comb(N,A)*C
Where N is the number of people on the project and I is the average individual productivity and A is the average number of communication lines that an individual maintains during the project and C is the loss in productivity due to one communication.
The above graph shows the output of the above formula given some arbitrary inputs (which doesn’t seem too far of a moderately sized software project..). As you can see, the first few people added will add a lot to productivity, after which the return diminishes to a point where the return is actually negative and growingly negative for each added person due to the communication and coordination overhead.
..and if someone wonders if it is actually possible to have negative progress as a result of overload of people and bureaucracy, the short answer is: yes it is.
Ahh yes. So Wille, by leaving your current contract you are actually doing them a favour. Not only do they not have to pay your outrageous daily rate but your absence increases the marginal productivity of the entire project (assuming the project was already in a decreasing productivity spiral). In fact, armed with this new concept I am thinking of invoicing the company to stay away from the project based on the expected productivity returns of me not being there. Is this something dogbert consulting would dream up?
In fact, armed with this new concept I am thinking of invoicing the company to stay away from the project based on the expected productivity returns of me not being there. Is this something dogbert consulting would dream up?
Absolutely. I am considering billing them for my absence. And perhaps sell them rubbish bins to use as helmets, so their most valuable asset won’t escape.