Being involved in some development projects and sharing resources with my colleagues, I realized that there must be a critical mass of sorts when it comes to numbers of projects any organisation can run at the same time before none of them will get finished. The reason for it is very simple: if you shere resources, those have limited time and capacity to fulfil the tasks you present them with in form of specifications or requests. Those are true to a certain moment in time – the world is ever-changing, so are the specs or requirements. Now if your project gets bumped because of the change in priorities, it could get more changes while idle… and then if you push hard enough, it will be moved to the top of the queue removing other project. If you repeat that game often enough, all projects will be worked on, none will get finished, and all of them will have delays. This is the critical mass I came up with.
Luckily for all of us this is just a theory, and even if the situation will come up in reality, it will (or it should) be very short-lived. Some projects will simply get cancelled, some will get finished, some will be added. But if no one will pay attention, this business of doing nothing except shuffling same projects on the priority chart will get you nowhere although everyone will be busy as hell.