With the nature of consulting team, one member could be assigned to multiple projects at once or handle the work of a member in one project that take more than 100% of his/her time per week.
Based on the Quality Software Management book of Gerald Weinberg, the resource context switching cost is shown as below:
The column "Loss to Context Switching" is a total loss for your productivity. Therefore, one person should only be assigned to maximum 3 projects at the same time, and the total working hour of that person should NOT exceed 120% (meaning not more than 12 hours per day).
It's the management job to prevent the situation from happening so that we can:
- Keep the quality of work for each member on a high standard
- Providing work-life balance for each member
- Member burned-out prevention
