Only one baby at a time

Now that I’ve been reading The Mythical Man-Month, I’m definitely understanding the argument that adding more people to an already late software project makes it even later. Bedrok isn’t built around helping software projects (yet), I’ve focused on the segment of design right now. But there are undoubtedly some good takeaways regardless. Here’s one:

1. Man power only increases the speed only when tasks can be partitioned among workers with no communication among them.

Time versus number of workers — perfectly partitionable task (a graphic from The Mythical Man-Month book)

The example given in the case of purely partitioned tasks is like picking crops in a field. No need to communicate between people, just pick.

But the problem with software projects is that much of the work to do is sequential in nature, thus unpartitionable. An example is supposedly debugging.

Time versus number of workers — unpartitionable task (a graphic from The Mythical Man-Month book)

The author gives a great way to think about unpartitionable tasks with the illustration of a mother giving birth:

“The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned.”

Work on a spectrum

So we have perfectly partitionable and unpartitionable tasks, and of course there’s stuff all in between. Assuming a marketplace’s value proposition to clients would be “same day delivery on any size project”, it seems that it would be impossible to deliver that in some industries.

Whereas in other industries, you might have to develop different solutions where same day deliver is possible. It doesn’t seem there would be a one size fits all solution to create same day delivery because the nature of design work is different from copywriting, which is different from whatever else.

And it would be crazy to go through all that effort to build something that clients don’t need all the much in the first place. So that’s why I’m going back to the discovery phase and doing as much research in the business world as possible. Not necessarily looking at problems that clients have when hiring freelancers, but problems that businesses have in general. I might as well give myself as broad of a problem space as possible to explore, hone in the biggest problems, and see how freelancers can alleviate one of those big pains. All while trying to guarantee cash flow for the freelancer.