Right Sizing Your Team

You've likely long heard Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters talk about The Law of the Small Team, as if somehow there's a magical number of people that makes a team ideal. Steve Denning wrote about 3 agile laws in a 2016 Forbes Article, stating that "work should in principle be done in small autonomous cross-functional teams working in short cycles on relatively small tasks and getting continuous feedback from the ultimate customer or end user." But WHY is the size of the team so important, and how does the size of the team help us live up to agile values and principles?

Agile Values

First let's dive into some values that agile sets out to honor.

The Scrum Guide states that using Scrum effectively relies on living five values. These values are commitment, focus, openness, respect and courage. We know that each relationship we have requires work to maintain commitment and respect. We also know that we can easily get into a state of information overload if we do not maintain focus. And being open with individuals at work creates a sense of vulnerability we aren't quite used to. So how do we honor these values? A first start is to limit the number of connections we're trying to make within our teams. The Scrum Guide specifically says a team should be "small enough to remain nimble and large enough to complete significant work within a Sprint, typically 10 or fewer people."

In The Agile Pocket Guide, Author and Business Leader Peter Saddington notes the qualities of accountability, teamwork, adaptability, collaboration and communication as key to a teams success. Within these values - specifically, it's much easier to accomplish good communication and collaboration practices within a small team.

The right sized team can help us honor commitment, focus, openness,
respect and courage. These values help us deliver customer value and
inspect and adapt rapidly so that we learn faster.

- Kim Scribner, CMG Agile Coach          

Understanding Why Size Matters

Lines of Communication. Working in an effective team requires communication to flow easily with less pomp and circumstance. As members are added to a team we increase the lines of communication by multiples. For example when we go from 6 team members to 12 team members - we increase the lines of communication from 15 to 66! Imagine trying to communicate, especially in a distributed workforce, a message clearly 66 times.

Accountability. Mike Cohn has noted that keeping teams small reduces social loafing - where people exert less effort because they believe others will pick up the slack. Think about how easy it is to say to yourself, "someone else will take care of it" when you're working as part of a large organization. When you work as part of a small team, and you use the ceremony of Daily Scrum, you build in a natural inspect and adapt that allows the team members to hold each other accountable.

Coaches Note: The goal is NOT to make each other feel bad, but instead to be transparent about current state so that we can adapt as we learn new information.

Big Enough. Teams must also be big enough to get things done. There's a reason that focused and committed are part of the five scrum values. When you have a self-reliant team that can bring value to customers from idea to production you are more likely to succeed. They can help each other create the focus necessary to not be distracted. And while you may think that creating this focus is impossible because you have too many things to accomplish as an organization - you may reflect on what would happen if you create short time boxes of focus.

Finding the "Right Size"

As with many things in agile, finding the right sized team may require some experimentation. At CMG we recommend starting with the following:

1. What is the mission and purpose of this team?
2. What are some of their initial goals and objectives?
3. What are the roles that would typically be needed to fulfill on those goals?
4. Who within the broader team has an agile mindset (collaborative, adaptive, focused)?

Once you've activated your team use your typical practices to inspect by thinking about the following:

1. How often do we have full team attendance at important conversations?
2. Do we have team members who rarely participate in deliverables or discussions?
3. Do we often have to go outside the team to get approvals or deliver value to customers?

Keep in mind that if you do need to change the team membership for effectiveness or efficiency, you'll want to reset as each team is a unique organism that needs their own set of working norms.

Learn more about CMG's approach to Agile.