What's the Scarcest Resource?

Surprisingly, the famous software/hardware designer and author, Dr. Fred Brooks, says that what holds up projects usually isn't money....

Brooks: The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing. 

from a 2010 Wired Magazine article:    http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/07/ff_fred_brooks/

He is called "the father of the IBM 360" (a major leap forward in computer hardware)

and author of The Mythical Man-Month:

You can’t accelerate a nine-month pregnancy by hiring nine pregnant women for a month. Likewise, says University of North Carolina computer scientist Fred Brooks, you can’t always speed up an overdue software project by adding more programmers; beyond a certain point, doing so increases delays.  

Working together on the educational game set FunFunctions

Summary:

• Many of the following ideas also apply to the FunFunctions development project, at this stage of open source programming and preliminary discussions.
• The MIT Media Lab has impressed at every turn, such as when I viewed their products in the Evolving Technology section of SIGGRAPH, appearing year after year with something new, such as projected stories slipping off the edges of a table as you tilt it and a miniature spinning 3d house in a glass cube that morphs when confronted with a math equation (cos, sin, etc.).
• R. Keith Sawyer is in another blog entry.

The following is from Kyle Welche's blog, at http://kylewelch.wordpress.com/2013/06/15/the-mit-media-lab/

MIT Media Lab

"The MIT Media Lab is something of an anomaly in academia.  It breaks down walls that constrain nearly all institutions of higher education.  First, it is deliberately interdisciplinary.  Whereas most graduate programs tend to focus on intra-departmental synergy more than inter-departmental synergy, the MIT Media Lab draws experts from a wide variety of fields, spanning the arts, sciences, and communications.  Rather than maintaining a uni-disciplinary lab, they have developed an intellectual ecosystem that produces ideas and permutations that can only collaborative diversity can create.
...
Additionally, the Lab favors collective ownership over individualism.  Rather than adopting the traditional academic route that rewards individuals for publishing more than their peers, the Lab does focuses on projects large enough to not consolidate credit to a single person. Additionally, collective IP ownership of products includes faculty, students, and their corporate sponsors.
...

The Media Lab’s organization revolves around specific goals.  The body of faculty, students, and sponsors is divided into teams that are dedicated to specific projects.  All research, design, and development is centered on tangible outcomes.  A list of current projects (some of which are staggeringly bold) can be found here.

The first of Sawyer’s key flow-enabling conditions is the concept that a group must be focused on a specific goal.  Sawyer notes that flow is catalyzed when a group has 'a compelling vision and a shared mission' (44). "

-----------------------

Sawyer, K. (2007). Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. New York, NY: Basic Books. ISBN-13;978-0-465-07192-0.