I’m starting to be fairly confident that the ‘budget’ lever for a project might as well be disconnected from the feature and timeliness ones. Spending more money doesn’t make things go any faster. Especially adding more people makes things fo slower.
Completely agree on the not going any faster point. The Mythical Man Month demonstrates this exact concept perfectly.
The budget lever is still available in limited forms e.g. do you devote two engineers from the team to project A or three? The point here is that the engineers have to be already up to speed on the codebase and already know how to work with their colleagues; and adding more on project A leaves fewer for project B, C, and D etc.
Also there is monetary budget. Can I solve an engineering inefficiency by throwing larger servers, or buying a licence for a relevant software service?
It is connected... until the project start, eg. in the broad general planning phase, when you press "start" it gets disconnected and stays that way until you ship a usable (±new) version.
Once the wheels are in motion you can only accelerate by breaking off sub-projects/teams... but if you're at a point where this can accelerate you, it means you were already slow-as-hell :|
