When is 1 * 100 <> 10 * 10?
When estimating #Salesforce project costs.
If 10 tasks is estimated to take 100 days to complete, won’t the cost be the same if I had 1 person working for 100 days or 10 people working for 10 days?
The answer is: No.
First of all, those 10 tasks may not be able to be done in parallel.
Task 2 may depend on Task 1 being completed, and so on.
Of course, there are some tasks that may be done in parallel once the groundwork has been completed, e.g. when the data model has been configured, but they will all never be concurrent.
Second, there’s more overhead when you have more team members.
You need to plan, schedule, coordinate – to make sure that things go well and people don’t step over each other’s toes.
You need to _orchestrate_ the whole delivery.
Who’s going to do what?
How are we going to merge the code properly?
How do we make sure consistency of quality?
Who is going to do peer review?
How do we ensure we don’t trip over each other when testing, fixing and deploying?
Potentially, the more cooks you add to the kitchen, the more chaos there will be.
Unless you have a sous chef, who’s a second in command to the executive chef.
That means you might need a team lead to assist the project manager, who’s job will be to manage and coordinate the team.
This additional overhead will add to the cost.
And that is why 1 * 100 <> 10 * 10 when estimating project costs.
It’s the same with 🍩.
Eating 1 donut a day for 10 days is not the same as eating 10 🍩 in 1 day.
Believe me.
The math doesn’t work here either 🤢
#onthepeiroll
#projectmanagement