A related bit is that you can’t generally respond to occasional weeks when you need 200hr of work by bringing in new people, or people from other areas of the company. You need people who already understand your systems, understand the general shape of the work (at least in normal times), and know how to work together.
You also need to be able to handle losing an employee. Even if you could get along fine with a single competent highly utilized person, if everything depends on them and they quit you’re in massive trouble. Much less so if you have three people who could each do all the work on their own.
There are often large gains to be found in finding lower priority work for people to be doing that replaces the solitaire, though pushing too hard here risks losing people.
A related bit is that you can’t generally respond to occasional weeks when you need 200hr of work by bringing in new people, or people from other areas of the company. You need people who already understand your systems, understand the general shape of the work (at least in normal times), and know how to work together.
You also need to be able to handle losing an employee. Even if you could get along fine with a single competent highly utilized person, if everything depends on them and they quit you’re in massive trouble. Much less so if you have three people who could each do all the work on their own.
There are often large gains to be found in finding lower priority work for people to be doing that replaces the solitaire, though pushing too hard here risks losing people.