Brooks’ Law Continued — Team Ramp-up
Study your Ramp Curves
You'll also want to become intimately familiar with the dynamics of adding resources within your teams. In a 6th Sense Analytics environment, this equates to monitoring individual and team based Active Times during the course of project work. Find a team where new member(s) have been added and review the impacts, such as:
- How quickly do new addition(s) ramp-up on Active Time to meet average levels within their specific group or role?
- If they've come from another group or technical focus, what is the difference in Active Time between the different activities?
- What is the impact (drain) to existing developers on the team? And to the team leader or assigned mentor?
All of this leads to more accurately predicting the overall contribution levels as new team members arrive and existing team members leave project efforts, which helps your planning and ability to react to project ramps – and reply more effectively to those "help" offers mentioned earlier.
I usually experience a sort of step function during ramp-up. Usually I'll apply a 33% rule when planning for resources. Typically that implies they will –
- Have a negative impact for the first 33% of time (let's say a month for relatively inexperienced engineers
- Have a neutral impact for the next 33%, again let's use a month as a baseline
- Begin having a positive impact the next 33%, another month
- Then ramp-up to average contribution rates within the team
This effect is further illustrated in Tom DeMarco's book The Deadline. In Chapter 10 he presents the concept of usable staff, which quantifies the above relationship across an entire team.
I should generally put in a plug for DeMarco and Tim Lister as having also explored this in their earlier work, Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams. In The Deadline there are a set of models presented that take this one step further. He alludes to programming a model that can perform what-if scenarios for usable staff calculations.
If you think about it, 6th Sense Analytics collected Active Time data would be a wonderful calibration mechanism for any modeling tool. It would support the determination of real-time usable staff under dynamic project conditions and require no data collection effort. If anyone has the time, I'd love to work with you on setting up an Excel (or other) model that we could connect to 6th Sense Analytics. I think the potential of such a tool would be very exciting and quite useful to our community. If you're interested, email us at info [@] 6sa.com.
