Staff Seniority

Falling in line with Cocomo's emphasis on staff seniority, many leading organizations recognize the importance of senior staff. Many years ago, the Director of Development at Microsoft pointed out to me that he had identified senior personnel as a critical success factor. He said that one of the keys to success of a product such as Microsoft Excel was to have at least two of the senior staff continue over from the previous release of the same product.

In a study of runaway projects in the United Kingdom, project managers identified "insufficient senior staff" as a contributing cause of project difficulties in approximately 40 percent of the projects that overran their schedules or budgets to a significant degree.^[6]

Even organizations that focus strongly on software processes recognize the important role of human factors. The NASA Software Engineering Laboratory was the first organization to win the IEEE Computer Society's award for software process achievement. In their Recommended Approach to Software Development, Revision 3 one of their top nine recommendations is "Do start the project with a small, senior staff."^[7]