[w8rbt]

If managers come to developers with problems that are NP complete, no matter how well they transfer the idea/vision, or set time expectations, the problem cannot be solved efficiently. And, unless the developers have been trained in CS/Math they may not even understand that what they are being asked to do cannot be done.

For example, say a manager has an idea to find the largest group of friends in a massive social network. He wants a developer to write an app for that and has a 20K budget and 2 months. You could not write this app with 10 times that budget or time.

How can you determine which group of friends is the largest?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NP-complete_problems

[ansgri]

The thing is, there are almost no cases where a problem must be solved in some strict mathematical sense. Huge part of project management is the problem reformulation to fit the existing solution to the initial requirement: what do you mean it is not a clique? it's still a group of friends, 80% of which know all others, with empirically tested chance less than 5% that any person knows less than half of others.

[jacobush]

There is also a sort of "corporate interaction" NP complete game. It's hard making department- or corporate-wide changes.