title: What percentage of project hours should be developer development (non-meeting) for maximum output
body: <p>I'm working on a typical internal web/database app for a large corporation.  By typical, I mean, a project that was projected to be 4 months and $300,000 looks like its going to be <strong>9 months and $1,000,000.</strong></p>
  
  <p>IMHO, one reason for gross over-run is the ratio of functional people to developers, 3.5 to 2 (PM, BA, QA, and a scrum master that comes to every meeting.)  About 250k of 600k has been billed by developers but at least half of that is developers sitting in meetings with functional people trying build consensus with functionaly people who are not very analytically inclined.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Many hours are also spent with the BA meeting with customers</strong> and getting buy-in for an overly complicated system that focus more on the edge cases than the core functionality.  Given enough time these people will redesign the wheel as a square for fear that a round wheel might role away!</p>
  
  <p>One issue here is that the BA, QA, and PM aren't geeks and the users are staff level, mostly non-technical people.  For each hour of meetings and talk and consesus building, I have to spend two hours conviencing them that they are trying to build all the flaws of a paper system into a digital system and that the power of a digital system is that 90% of the controls established by the paper system aren't necessary.</p>
  
  <p>The long and short of it is that I feel like I <strong>could write a version of the system with 90% functionality in 2 months</strong> if they would just leave me alone.  Granted, it might be the wrong system but given another month or two, I'm confident that I could get it right.</p>
  
  <p>So I am wondering, <strong>"what is your opinion of the optimal functional hours to developer hours on a project?"</strong>  Also, "Is there any published guidance on this"</p>