Outcomes at a Glance

• $4.3M saved by right‑sizing project staffing
• Delivered nearly twice the functionality with a more reliable product
• Only 2 weeks of delay after cutting team size in half
• Freed up 30 staff members, enabling a 9‑month head start on the next initiative
• Identified chronic overstaffing across 18 completed applications

Context

A government development organization asked QSM to benchmark productivity across 18 completed financial applications (25,000–225,000 ESLOC). Although the client’s productivity was near the Government IT industry average, team sizes were 2–3× larger than equivalent projects. The result: higher costs, poorer reliability, and diminishing returns on schedule compression.
A project manager needed to begin work on a new technology initiative, but lacked available staff because an ongoing project was consuming an oversized team.

Barriers

• Chronic overstaffing, driving excessive cost and defect rates
• Belief that adding more people accelerates delivery (despite evidence to the contrary)
• Communication overhead across large teams causing reliability issues
• No quantitative baseline to validate optimal team sizes
• Resource bottlenecks preventing initiation of strategic new projects

What QSM Delivered

QSM used SLIM‑Metrics and historical benchmarking to show that smaller teams would deliver better cost, schedule, and reliability outcomes. A project manager adopted the approach by splitting a 60‑person team into two groups:

• One finished the existing system
• The other began the new technology project

Results were dramatic:

• The existing project finished only 2 weeks later than planned
• Delivered nearly twice the functionality
• Achieved higher reliability
• Saved $4.3M in development cost
• Released 30 staff to begin the next project 9 months earlier than expected

This case cemented the organization’s understanding that smaller, optimized teams produce more predictable, higher‑quality results at significantly lower cost.