Re: The bigger the project the worse they are

> My smaller projects have nearly all succeeded and my largest ones have
> nearly all been white elephants. Are there studies or authoritative
> sources showing declines in efficiency as projects grow?
>

Large projects are harder to manage, programmers are hard to manage as is
(if we weren't original, independent thinkers we'd not be programmers).
Most people managing software projects are either not trained as managers
(they're programmers or analysts) or not programmers, and as such are not
qualified to do this job.

Small projects usually manage themselves, large projects need more
structure and steering.
Thus large projects tend to fail and small projects have a higher chance
of success.

That's my personal experience over the last more than a decade (with a few
notable exceptions tbh, where the managers were both good managers and
could relate well to the technical staff, large projects do tend to work).

Another major problem with large projects is that there's often the
incentive to just add more manpower if things start to go wrong.
This almost always leads to even more delays as the new staff need to be
inducted into the team and got up to steam, taking time away that could
have been used to analyse and fix what's actually wrong (rather than
muddling along with more hours and try to make that work).