There's a great manufacturing-management book that regrettably speaks to a manufacturing context and not a project context and therefore applying it literally to our software projects would be a fallacy, called “The Goal”—and then the rederivation of the same principles for project management is in a follow-up book called “Critical Chain.”
They are both weird in that they are textbooks written as novels and therefore you do have to roll your eyes a little bit, of course when the beleaguered manager follows the smart scientist’s advice his company succeeds and his marriage gets better, sigh. And why is it a he, both times? But if you pay the cost of these eye rolls you get some joyous moments.
For instance, your “panic mode” is discussed in The Goal (as “factories that seem to have three priority levels: Hot, Red Hot, and Do It NOW!!!”) and the emergence of those panic modes is actually diagnosed as a failure of those first principles. If you had managed differently, you would have been aware of your spare capacity, and this panic mode instead becomes a business problem of some sort—either you are not getting enough biz value out of your “SuperImportantEmergencyBugfix” project to justify continued investment of developer time or you are not getting enough biz value out of the EvenMoreImportant project or else you are getting enough business value out of both that it is time to expand your dev team so that your bottom line can get better sooner. But rather the panic is usually because the two projects are not profitable either way, and the company was willing to take a loss to build them up to profitability, but now revenues have gotten unexpectedly tighter and people are trying to fallaciously optimize on cost rather than marginal profit.
I'm also reminded a bit of Simon Wardley's dialogues with X; these are just a roundabout way of him expressing his thoughts, but because they're structured as a debate, i think he gives himself a bit of unearned authority when he runs rings around his imaginary opponent:
For instance, your “panic mode” is discussed in The Goal (as “factories that seem to have three priority levels: Hot, Red Hot, and Do It NOW!!!”) and the emergence of those panic modes is actually diagnosed as a failure of those first principles. If you had managed differently, you would have been aware of your spare capacity, and this panic mode instead becomes a business problem of some sort—either you are not getting enough biz value out of your “SuperImportantEmergencyBugfix” project to justify continued investment of developer time or you are not getting enough biz value out of the EvenMoreImportant project or else you are getting enough business value out of both that it is time to expand your dev team so that your bottom line can get better sooner. But rather the panic is usually because the two projects are not profitable either way, and the company was willing to take a loss to build them up to profitability, but now revenues have gotten unexpectedly tighter and people are trying to fallaciously optimize on cost rather than marginal profit.