I saw his diagrams as referring to a stream of projects rather than a single project. Or a backlog of tickets if you look at it from an agile perspective. In th

I saw his diagrams as referring to a stream of projects rather than a single project. Or a backlog of tickets if you look at it from an agile perspective. In that environment you can definitely have a team be falling behind in the sense of items going into the backlog faster than they are worked on. Each item is a project with a deadline that is being missed. However the team metric is not merely those individual existing projects but the aggregate of all current and future projects. A larger team will usually help with that last metric in the long term.