How to Maintain Balance in Project Management?

This time I will write about an interesting topic, which is a vast field, but at some point, it comes to the fore in practically every project. I will focus on scaling and how to achieve the right balance in project management that leads to better results and not chaos.

It is known that adding more people to the same problem doesn’t make it any easier to solve. But if you can find a way to become more effective as you grow, that’s scaling.

Scaling in practice

When a company embarks on a new project, at a certain stage, it has to start scaling. If the scope of tasks increases significantly and the team can no longer cope with them, it is time for the next step. At this stage, the manager starts to find a solution in a way that he hires new people or redeploys them to the project, which makes sense. However, this is only effective up to a certain point, as sooner or later bottlenecks begin to form, making the mass of additional labour no longer helpful.

How many workers can build a house most efficiently and quickly?

For a better understanding, I will use an example of building a house that can be well imagined. For example, if we decide that we want to build the whole house with the help of five people, this will be conditionally feasible, but the process will be very time-consuming. If we draw a parallel with the business project mentioned above, then at this point we would decide to involve more people in the house construction project.

If we increase the team proportionately and allow employees to each do their job, then we have no problem. However, if we wanted to speed up the project a lot and decided that 70 people would build the house, we would encounter disproportion. There would be many bottlenecks, as they would not have enough mixers, material, and different teams would not be able to do the work at once, which, for example, must follow each other in a particular sequence.

The same happens with projects, so it is crucial that we approach scaling thoughtfully, prudently and do not forget the consolidation phase, which helps to eliminate bottlenecks.

All segments need to grow, not just one

In projects, it is crucial that we adapt all segments wisely, and not just increase the number of people in charge of the project. In software development, for example, the environment is usually prepared for a limited number of people. For example, four people cannot write the same code at the same time or do some functionality at once, as no suitable infrastructure is in place to support it. This is similar to having two mixers on a construction site when building a house, and 10 people would be waiting for them to use it at the same time.

Good practice at easy.bi

At easy.bi, we mostly solve such challenges through good organization and experience of how large projects can be optimally managed. Also, we have set up such an infrastructure, within which we have professionally positioned tools for development, that we can scale with more people up to a certain point. Nevertheless, we are looking for balance at all times and using the most important key – the consolidation phase, which optimizes the project, eliminates bottlenecks from a human and technological perspective and creates optimal guidelines for continuing work.