jack@his.com (jack hirschfeld) cautions:
>...Slow down,take your time and learn a lesson from the maternity ward. No
>"fast-paced environment" or "mandate for change" or "permanent white
>water" will alter the 9-month term of pregnancy. Even with the best
>technology, a baby born early in the third trimester is a very expensive
>proposition (in business terms, one must ask if it's cost effective), and
>if born in the second trimester, its chances for survival are very iffy
>and its ability to thrive is severely limited during the first year.
The 9 month analogy reminded me of Fred Brookes who wrote The Mythical
Man-month, in which, among other items, he claims that software management
at IBM believed that, if one person can produce a baby in 9 months, then 9
people can produce one in 1 month! This was the thesis for the fact that
planning by man-month (now properly called person-month) was totally
false.
He developed a formula for team size that said the complexity grows by
(n**2-n)/2 when there are n people all equally involved in the task. So
the number for an 8 person team would be 28. Functional specialization
reduces this somewhat. This way of sizing complexity as it relates to
organizational change may have some merit. Certainly the number of
communications paths grows according to his formula!
[Host's Note: Ah... Back to my math fun! The formula above is the number
of 2-person pairings in a group of n people. ...Rick]
--Keith Cowan <72212.51@CompuServe.COM>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>