Systems Thinking, Project Management, and Agile - Part 5: It Lives! But it's Out of Control!

[For this series, it will help to have read "System Dynamics and Causal Loop Diagrams 101."]

In the previous article for this series, I described three options managers could consider if moving the project deadline was out of the question.

1. Increase employee work intensity

2. Call for overtime

3. Hire people

On the face of it, they each appeared to offer a path toward returning a drifting schedule to be on time. Now let's look a little further down the road to see what happens when the juice is applied to each of these options in turn. If we implement any of these options, what are the likely consequences?

We know that errors in the work flow are unavoidable. If we encourage or pressure the development team to finish more work in less time (the Work Faster Loop¹, Figure 1, C) this will result in an increase in the errors along with an increase in the amount of Work Done.