Staff IT

 

To be effective as a project manager, you need to control four elements: time, scope, cost and quality. While some of my previous articles have showed you how to effectively size projects and control quality, we have not yet discussed how to properly staff a project in order to meet both your time-to-market objectives and budget constraints.

When staffing software projects, keep the following three rules in mind:

1. Adding more resources to a project does not allow you to indefinitely compress its schedule.
2. Once a project is sufficiently staffed, each additional resource will be less productive than the previous one.
3. The size of the project team should increase from the Description to the Construction phase, stabilize during Construction, and decrease from the Construction to the Verification phase.

Schedule Compression Factor
The Schedule Compression Factor (SCF) explains the degree to which a project schedule has been compressed. Its mathematical formula is:

SCF = S_C/S_N, where

S_C is the compressed schedule
S_N is the nominal schedule

Most researchers have concluded that it is impossible to have an SCF lower than 70 to 80 percent. In other words, no matter how many resources you add to a project, you will not compress its nominal schedule by more than 20 to 30 percent.

For example, if your project requires approximately 100 …

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