A model for R&D project management: how does the number of teams influence the project performance?

Determining the optimal number of team members in projects is a key factor in Project Management. The choices related to projects’ team dimensions are usually based upon the Project Managers’ previous experience and it presents itself with little structure, as it is believed that the structural approach does not take into account immaterial aspects, such as creativity, which is difficult to measure and therefore hard to manage. In such a context, the aim of this paper is to provide project managers with guidelines useful to determine the ideal dimensions of a project team along the lines of a formal approach and it does so by considering how numerosity may affect the effort of coordination and communication among members, production capacity and creative skills, especially when the latter constitutes an essential factor, as in Research and Development (R&D) projects. To this aim a model is put forward which presents itself quite straightforwardly from the mathematical point of view and the results of which can be easily interpreted. An effort has been made to reduce to a minimum the number of free parameters, which might arbitrarily characterize th functions utilized. Therefore, on the only free parameter a Sensitivity Analysis has been conducted which has shown a certain robustness of the model, thus allowing to get to interesting conclusions about the determination of the ideal dimensions of a project team engaged in Research and Development activities.