My understanding is that the "multiplicative factor" can typically be mostly attributed to what I call "quality of organization". Not to be confused with effici

My understanding is that the "multiplicative factor" can typically be mostly attributed to what I call "quality of organization". Not to be confused with efficiency, the quality of organization is measure of how smoothly things go. For example, how likely it is that you are going to be distracted from your task, how much unpredictable synchronous coordination you need to complete your task, etc. An organization which can plan more of its work will have higher quality and an organization where more of its work is of unplanned nature will have lower quality. There are some possible exceptions. For example, some organizations may have a lot of work unplanned but that unplanned work is segregated to not affect people working on planned work, etc. For example, you may have operations and development teams where operation absorbs most of the unplanned stuff and only rarely bothers the development. Now, just because work can be accurately planned doesn't mean the organization is efficient. As an example, military tends to be relatively quite good at planning, very inefficiently (ignore the latest failed high profile project...) On the other hand startups tend to be more efficient while also less predictable environments. I like to think that at some scale of the project some level of trust in projections is necessary to be able to even organize the project. So some drop in efficiency is acceptable in order to be able to plan work.