Low on resources
The project will get less resources than it is projected it needs. This is the Hololens-only project and aside the long awaited historical side this is what would need the most effort actually as it might give us some real market. Other R&D projects only have the lenses like a secondary thing. I am technically the project lead, but there is a formal project manager in her title too. She insist on cutting down budgets, but what she does not understand is that the original one was calculating with high-performing friends of mine who once had red topcoder ratings or are so awsome at maths and programming that they can learn anything new and do real innovation. They are not available to us now and despite we seem to have a real team now, with them the projections are that it will take longer and will be more expensive because there is always a critical path that some people are just not able to work on properly.
Details
Given this I have though about something: we might actually save money if we apply fewer people and only the better ones like the new collegues of mine! The project can span two years so in order to cut down man-months we need to carefully cherry-pick the bests only and let all others work on the other projects.
I will try to find out the followings to ensure that I am right:
- How many man-days they want us to take (I knew this last week, but I want to be sure and I do not have this at home)
- See some patterns about how long the decided man-days would lasts with 1-member team, 2-member team, 3-4-5 member team.
- According to the last two stuff I can tell them that they can keep their wishes with this or that dedicated people.
- If they insist on having them at other places they will have an understanding why it is above price.
I will also need to consider what I need more:
- More people being introduced to the AR creative workshop (so workshop grows possibilities)
- More correctly going with the planned funds
I surely do not want to create lower on the quality side, but still it might be a long-time win if more people are introduced to my team. I however quitly tend towards small but effective team.
Actually however the best would be to apply what I call: "zero-overhead-development". For that I would need complete control over a small group of GrepInvent. When high leaders would gather for allocation, they cannot allocate people anymore directly, but they can allocate my team as a whole - and everything in my team should be decided on the team level! Not for micromanagement, but exactly the opposite of that: by teaching self-management (the only way to micromanage is when each one of us micromanage only him/herself or very small neighborhood of theirs).
If someone is really-really needed on an other project, they can maybe allocate him 70% to there and 30% to "GrepInvent" and this should work well together with their already existing allocation schemes. For R&D I would like it much better if we can allocate ourselves instead of following their decisions with the worst overhead ever.
Assign a team to the problem and do not micromanage persons towards problems by thinking you are an overly clever manager!!!
Tags: interesting, management, pattern, anti-pattern
