The “Bermuda Plan” or how to speed up project by removing people
The “Bermuda Plan” is a strategy of removing most people from a project (understand sending them on vacation to Bermuda) to allow the remaining core team to complete the project more quickly. The goal is to reduce team size and the coordination work at the same time, keeping the top performers focus on delivery and removing the under performers who are slowing down the projet.
The “Bermuda Plan” is a corollary of Brooks’s Law. Fred Brook is a Software Engineer and the author of The Mythical Man-Month published in 1975, that says:
“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”
Innocently, you’d think that adding more people to a project would make it move even faster, but that’s not entirely true. First of all, doubling a team does not make the project progress twice as fast. Then, to some degree, adding more people to a project will slow down team velocity because of the coordination costs.
Here are Brooks explanations:
- People already in the project need to onboard newcomers: this reduces team velocity until…
