If you’re involved in any kind of software development work, I highly recommend the Harvard Business Review article Six Myths of Product Development (it’s paywalled, but keep reading”¦). It details 6 common misconceptions of most product development managers:

1. High utilization of resources will improve performance.
2. Processing work in large batches improves the economics of the development process.
3. Our development plan is great; we just need to stick to it.
4. The sooner the project is started, the sooner it will be finished.
5. The more features we put into a product, the more customers will like it.
6. We will be more successful if we get it right the first time.

The authors detail the effects of and possible solutions to each of these fallacies. Here’s an excerpt from the resource people utilization section:

In both our research and our consulting work, w’ve seen that the vast majority of companies strive to fully employ their product-development resources. The logic seems obvious: Projects take longer when people are not working 100% of the time””and therefore, a busy development organization will be faster and more efficient than one that is not as good at utilizing its people.

But in practice that logic doesn’t hold up. We have seen that projects’ speed, efficiency, and output quality inevitably decrease when managers completely fill the plates of their product-development employees””no matter how skilled those managers may be.

Unfortunately the full article is behind a paywall. You can read the whole thing if you haven’t hit your 3-articles-per-month quota yet (sigh”¦). Or you can download this PDF I made of the print view.