Fred Brooks describes lessons he has learned in the management of software development projects, particularly IBM's development of OS/360. He raises important organizational implications of committing to development and/or implementation of a new ICT project.
The most famous lesson of this book is that adding staff to a project can often hinder rather than facilitate completion of the product. As the size of a group increases, its "burden of communication" increases dramatically. The result of this burden is the counterintuitive, but now quite widely accepted Brooks's Law: "Adding manpower to a late project makes it later." Another vital consideration is that "incompleteness and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation," meaning that clarification must be seen as an ongoing process.
Taken together, these observations imply that administrative tasks and "conceptual integrity" must be addressed early on and cannot be overcome by just throwing more human resources at an already problematic project. Anyone considering an ICT development effort that involves more than one person should considerable the significant administrative overhead and architectural strategies necessary to make the project a success.
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