Priority vs Reality

RFC 1925.2:

    No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority,
    you can't increase the speed of light.
    (2a) (corollary). No matter how hard you try, you can't make a
        baby in much less than 9 months. Trying to speed this up *might*
        make it slower, but it won't make it happen any quicker.

It seems a rite of passage for IT professionals – being asked to do something not physically possible because of the priority of a given project.  To borrow from science fiction terms, IT departments are sometimes tasked with pulling a Scotty – doing the nearly impossible with some technical wizardry.  In reality they have to work through the problem as in the events of Apollo 13, and find ways of making square pegs (or air scrubbers) fit in round holes.  On one occasion I heard an IT manager quote Mother Teresa after being given the timeline for their project.

I have been fortunate in my career in that I have never been asked to exceed the speed of light (though a couple times I’ve felt like I had been asked to approach it).   However, what I have regularly run into with some project managers has led me to add a second corollary to this Networking Truth:

    (2b) Some processes cannot be parallelized: three pregnant
        women can't jointly make a baby in 3 months.

I have sometimes had to spend considerable time justifying why a serial process cannot be accelerated by adding more people, and this example seems to finally put the concept in real terms.  Even in cases where the process can be broken up into bite-sized chunks, there comes a point where more resources do not translate into more value. Throwing resources at a project can help get around some constraints, but after some threshold is reached adding more resources just adds more logistics and opportunities for miscommunication.  A lot of people better versed than I have discussed this (see links below) but it seems the consensus is that while there is no optimal team size for all occasions, 3-5 works in a lot of cases.

When were you last asked to do something that couldn’t be done?

Optimal team size discussions:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/04/agile-optimal-team-size

http://www.qsm.com/process_01.html

http://www.teambuildingportal.com/articles/systems/teamperformance-teamsize

http://www.task1.info/journal/article4

http://www.brighthub.com/office/project-management/articles/62267.aspx