Less is more.
Which is better?
4 Start projects with little team capacity and longer duration.
OR
Start 2 projects with high team capacity and start the next two after completion?
The answer is shown in the graph: as a rule, it is better to run fewer parallel projects per team.
Overall, this results in a significantly lower “cost of delay” caused by project delays.
Stop Starting – Start Finishing.
This guiding principle of the agile way of working expresses that it is preferable to successfully complete current projects first and, if necessary, support them to accelerate them before starting further projects for the same team.
This way of thinking is an important prerequisite for projects to get and stay in FLOW, i.e. to achieve a high and constant speed of implementation.
Case of maximum utilisation.
A popular counter-argument is that the so-called “workload” is cited: Teams or team members who are no longer fully utilised after finishing their project are waiting for a new project.
So one utilises these team members by starting them “already” with projects.
But if you always want to use all your resources to the full (they cost money), then you are rarely in a position to start a project cleanly with the necessary resources, because the resources are always already busy with something (else).
This favours the creation of many parallel projects and thus project delays.
Flow over Load.
Anyone who values workload higher than the optimal project FLOW accepts the risk of significant project delays!
However, if you first ensure the FLOW of projects and then fill any gaps in capacity utilisation with meaningful activities, you will be much better off overall.
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