Livestock

March 17, 2009 by Janusz Marcin Gorycki

Photo (c) Janusz Gorycki

"How many resources do you need for this project?”. "How much headcount” - or even: "how many headcounts” – "do we need to hire?” If you are working or have been working in any sort of corporate environment, chances are that you have heared sentences like that. If you are a project manager, you are maybe even using them in your daily work. This sort of vocabulary became common in the software industry and people use it without giving any thought to what these words really represent. "Human Resources” is typically the name of your people-management departament.

If you use phrases like that, please stop. Now. Not because it is offensive to the ones you call "resources” (though it is), not because you are vulgarizing the english language (you probably are, but I am not a native English speaker, so I don't much care. But similarly ugly HR-type phrases made it to my mother tongue unfortunately).

The valid, business-related reason for stopping this sort of language is that reffering to your people as "resources” skews reality and does measurable harm to your projects.

See, people are not "resources”. They are not coal, they are not water, not electricity, not gas. Especially in a creative discipline like software development. People, and especially teams of people behave in a wildly chaotic and non-linear fashion when it comes to reacting to changes in team size and its structure. It is a common knowledge that adding people to a late project makes it even more late. And it is also known that a brilliant developer is orders of magnitude more efficient than an average one. And that a bad developer can do much more harm than good to a project. What is less often mentioned is that a person is not usually able to work in a creative environment with the same efficiency all the time. For all sorts of reasons. Are they in a good mood? Are they motivated? Are they overworked? Or maybe bored out of their minds? This all matters, as well as the family situation, illnesses, stress. Also – do the team members like each other? Sometimes (but not in all cases) it is important for good performance. Then again – some teams work better when there is a tension between team members. You never know beforehand. What you also don't know, is how many people you need for a project. You learn it throughout the project. But it depends on who were the people you started with in the first place - it is unlikely that two teams working on the same project would end up with the same end-of-project size.

Now, if you start to try to average out all these absolutely crucial factors and only talk about one number – like "required headcount increase (or reduction) for this quarter” – your view of reality is distorted and you don't really know what will the effects of these increases or reductions be.

So what IS your resource? Basically it all boils down to one thing: the "resource” here is money that is required to pay for people's work. Now, you can spend the money in all sorts of ways and it is usually not the brightest idea to just simply hire X average guys to work for you. Maybe you should hire just one, but brilliant guy? Or maybe you shouldn't hire anybody! Maybe simply spend the money giving a raise to your top star (or a top team)? "Growth” is not necessarily always the right answer.

Well, these days unfortunately you are just as likely to contemplate "headcount reductions”. The way this is usually being done in corporate environments is "20% of headcount has to be let go”. Which ones? Sadly, the typical answer from senior management is "it doesn't matter, just reduce headcount”. Some sort of "performance evaluation” theater is likely to be performed – if only for legal reasons, but at the end of the day – it is pretty random who gets hit by a firing spree. The fallout after such "random acts of management” is usually catastrophic. It is like carpet-bombing a city and hoping that "on average” you will save some money because the bombed houses will no longer use electricity and water.

One of the companies that we work with has recently renamed their "Human Resources” departament to "Talent”. Admittedly, this is just a symbolic gesture that may or may not have practical consequences. But it means a mindset shift in the senior management of this company – after all, what you want is use people's talent and skills, and not use them as livestock.

Permalink