“The nature of project work is that whatever it is you’re about to build, the early conceptual phases are crucial. But this kind of conceptual work can’t be done with a crowd of people. A staff of no more than six might make perfect sense while the first-cut design decisions are made. Burdening the project with an extra fifty people at this stage will only make the work go slower. Or worse: With that many people on your budget, your every incentive as manager is to find something (anything!) for them to do. All your available choices here are bad. Anything you assign that many people to do locks you into conceptual decisions that haven’t yet been thought out. You’re forced to partition the whole—this kind of partitioning is the essence of design—along lines that are dictated by personnel-loading considerations rather than design considerations. The result is sure to be a mediocre or poor design, something that will encumber the project from this point on.”