Finding Brook's Law

I was recently one of two people put in charge of creating an all day training forum. This project was made up of four interactive workshops. Given our short timeline, we decided to recruit outside help to write the content for one of the workshops. Our outside help delivered on time, but we ended up re-writing and re-formatting the bulk of the content. The re-write included some late nights at the office – lots of fun.

Here’s the reality, what begins as “many hands, make light work” usually ends in “too many cooks in the kitchen.”

Why does collaboration seem to extend the deadline rather than shorten it? Turns out it has something to do with the idea that nine women can’t make a baby in a month. I’ve recently found out it’s also called Brook’s Law.

Brook’s Law, simply put, says that adding more people to a project prolongs or has zero impact on completion. Fred Brooks, the man behind Brook’s Law, was a software engineer and observed this phenomenon while working for IBM. As you add individuals you increase the number of communication channels exponentially.

Software Design and Instructional Design have many parallels, Brook’s Law being one Instructional Designers should consider. One solution to Brook’s Law was the idea of looking at your project team as a surgical team; a surgical team can only have one lead surgeon and a cast of supporting characters taking on less critical parts. In other words, if you have a lot of cooks; identify and promote one to Head Chef.