What would aircraft design be like if assigned vastly more engineers?

[Nik]

Two thoughts...

My early retirement from our small corner of 'Big Pharma' was partly to become my ailing wife's 'Designated Carer', partly due a progressive site down-size and, too much, a growing combination of gnarly wheel-reinvention and excessive admin / documentation.
Enough said on those !!

I'd been in the 'sweet spot' of being sufficiently involved in a lot of mid-sized projects / product introductions to provide useful input, yet not senior enough to be stuck with contradictory directives and/or inter-site politics...
As I saw it, if you had more people than could gather around a 6~~8 seat table and talk sense, you'd best add a couple of months slippage to that Gantt Chart.

The big project progression 'killer' was often senior manager egos. A quorum had 'Come Through The Labs', so retained a sufficient grounding in reality. Translated: They could be convinced by data and logic.

Too many imported managers varied between 'Ignorant' and 'MBA wits-bound', with added frisson that their bonuses depended on benighted minions delivering improbable demands on time and on budget. Adding more non-empowered folk to such a gathering just made things much, much worse...

 

[Arjen]

https://www.belbin.com/resources/articles-directory/how-many-people-in-a-team

Smaller teams​

When the researchers reduced the number to six, the team became more stable. (Teams of seven pitted against teams of six were unable to make the most of their numerical ‘advantage’.)

But if there are nine Team Roles, why was this the case?

Well, larger numbers necessitated structure – a suitable chairperson and each person playing one defined Team Role. This is a difficult set of criteria for real teams to fulfil.


By contrast, a team of six could cover a broad range of technical skills and Team Roles with each person ‘doubling up’ on roles, so that, with the right composition, it was well balanced.

Since most of us have more than one Team Role strength that can be played to good effect, this is more realistic and attainable for real teams.

It is not without significance that, for a period of at least a decade, six endured as the number that was found, on the internal evidence at Henley, to be most suitable for enabling a management team to tackle a complex problem.