I learned recently that an elephant's gestation period is 18 months. It takes 18 months for an elephant to have a baby elephant.

It's also a fact that three elephants can't make a baby elephant in six months. There is no shortcut; it takes one elephant 18 months.

The same is true for software development projects. Often I'll hear my clients say, "Can't we just hire more people to get this work done faster?" And unfortunately, frequently the answer is "no."

There could be any number of reasons for this, from dependencies (e.g., we can't develop Z until Y is built and we can't build Y until X is finished...) to actual resources (e.g., Martha is the only developer who can do that work; training up someone new would take longer than Martha doing it alone).

This shouldn't stop you from asking the question "Is there anything we can do to speed this up?" But sometimes we just have to acknowledge that a project is going to take as long as the project takes, no matter how many additional resources we throw at it.