Item — HN Reader

Spoiler: they don't know anything about it, no pictures and no specs. The company that worked on it is not revealed. Really the most notable thing is that it took only a year. The P-51 Mustang was conceived and put into service (wartime) also in a year.

It really is an achievement to go from concept to first flight in a year for a modern aircraft.

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When you don't design by committee, you can do things in a much quicker fashion. However, once people find out about it, they are going to start requesting a lot of changes because it's not the design they wanted.

The initial F-16 project faced that issue and the Fighter Mafia was pretty successful in preventing scope/mission creep.

Also true for all software projects.

That's exactly why I worded it without referencing airplanes. It's kind of a universal statement about committees.

My theory: In any organization there is a magic number of committee members, that once achieved, assures that the project will fail.

I was just thinking about this the other day when reading the comments on small nuclear reactors and how many organizations, governments and countries can't accomplish anything of significance in a timely, costly or efficient manner.

I was thinking it should be written like a law:

The success of a project or goal is inversely proportional to the number stakeholders, investors and/or general labour involved in the project/business/goal.

This idea is closely related to the 80/20 rule, the cost/performance/quality decision triangle, etc.

The mythical man month.