rjbm

Research Journal of Business and Management

2148-6689

Suat TEKER

10.17261/Pressacademia.2017.465

THE IMPACT OF INCREASING TEAM SIZE ON PROJECT PRODUCTIVITY

Lai

Yueh-yuan

Wei

Chiu-chi

Wei

, Chiou-shuei

06 30 2017

4 2 103 112 03 24 2017

2014

Research Journal of Business and Management

Purpose- Enterprises must increase operational efficiency to gaincompetitive advantage in this stiff global competition, and operationalefficiency is resulted from fast problem resolution and opportunitycreation. Project management has beenregarded as an effective and efficient approach to quickly solve currentproblems and create future opportunities.Speed is the most vital factor when facing with problems andopportunities; slowness will breed a small problem to a huge one, evenunmanageable, whereas a not quick enough pace will lead to opportunityuntouchable and fade away. Methodology- The challenge facing a project manager in this era ishow to complete a project quickly, and one of the most commonly used methods iscrashing, which implies shortening the project duration by increasing thenumber of workers and equipment, and by working overtime. Traditionally, it isa common believe that increasing the number of workers can certainly reduce theproject length; even the law of diminishing return is widely recognized. Thus,this study intends to explore the interaction of number increase anddiminishing return, and develop a quantitative model to concurrently considerthe number of workers, worker experience, worker training and level of teamwork to obtain the most suitable number of worker increase, to avoid waste ofhuman resources and optimize personnel utilization. Findings- To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model,this study uses two examples to illustrate the solution procedures. The results indicate that although theproject productivity can increase along with the increase of workers, when thenumber of workers reaches a certain level, even the worker is furtherincreased, the project cannot be positively benefited; therefore, the increasedworkers are not only wasted, but also decrease the entire project productivity.Conclusion- Project managers can use the modelto identify the optimal number of additional team members, thus improving humanresource management. This study is the first theoretical verification of thelaw of diminishing returns and provides a more in-depth understanding ofcrashing, which has both academic and practical value to project management.

Project project management crashing law of diminishing return productivity

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