97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know

Chapter 31. The Vicious Effects of Managing for Utilization

Daniel Heinen & Konstantin Ribel

Allow us to share the vicious effects we have observed when organizations add additional teams (from vendors) to an ongoing product development endeavor because it is not progressing as expected.

Every new vendor team needs to gain a full-system understanding of the product and how it is developed. How much help they need from experienced teams and how long the learning will take depends on the product complexity.

Consequently, Brooks’ law comes into effect (from Frederick Brooks’ book, The Mythical Man-Month [Addison-Wesley, 1995]):

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Feature output decreases, and management concern rises even further. Action is expected. The most obvious one is to add even more people. Since it is easier to ramp up (and later say goodbye to) external staff in comparison to recruiting internal staff, the hiring rate of (external) vendor teams rises steeply.

The product group size grows as do the differences between teams in terms of system understanding. However, a common expectation is a maximum utilization of teams and individuals. This leads to fragmentation of work along the current capabilities of the teams instead of organizing for ...