Team too big

Communication and collaborating becomes more difficult as team size increases. As teams get too large some working practices will become inefficient and some stop will stop working all together.

Team to big is almost always a problem in its own and the cause of other issues. 

What to look for

There are 10 or more people in the team. The more people the bigger the problem.

Why is it bad?

There is a lot of research into idea team size so this page will only be a summary.

Meeting cost

Meeting cost = number of people x duration of meeting

Meetings get exponentially more expensive the more people you add. Not only do you have to pay for the extra people the meeting then takes longer as you have more people. In addition as meeting size increases the probability of a distraction popping up increases to further adding to the cost.

Even if you meeting is still a success almost all meetings will be exponentially more expensive as you add more people.

Failed meetings

A lot of the common formats for team meetings start to break down. For example:

• Planning - imagine getting your team together to plan the work. To do this properly so every one understand and has chance to asnwer questions it takes about 20 min per person. For a team of 5 that meeting is going to take an hour and forty min. For a team of 15 that meeting would therefore take 5 hours. But peopel dont book 5 hour meetings, so the planning becomes work allocation with no time to ask questios or dive into the detail. The meeting effectivly no longer serves it intended purpose and you have to find another way to tell help people understand all their work. Either a second set of meetings or more often then not via documentation.
• Retrospective or lessons learned - these meetings requre trust and for people to be comfortable talking openly about what went wrong. A lot of peolpe will not be having these chats in a large group. So many of these meeting end up in a painful silences. Often getting abandoned completely as no good comes from them.

Social loafing - The Ringelmann Effect

In a small team everyone feels responsible for the outcome, you know you input is critical to the success of the team. It can be motivating and empowering. As team size increases individuals can feel less accountable for the results of the team. Multiple studies have shown that performance per person reduces as team size increases.

Nobody cares

It is hard to care about the work of many other people that is not related to you. Team members loose interest. Conversations and collaboration taking place will often only affect a small number of the team.

Individual performance is poor

What to look for

There are 10 or more people in the team. The more people the bigger the problem.

Underlying problems

A large team is usually the problem in itself but is occasionally exasperated by. 

Complex tech stack

Some teams need to many different skillsets to get anything done. So to make sure you can deliver end to end you need lots of different people with different skills. 

Related symptoms

Stand up too long

A large team will often cause longer meetings including stand ups 

Bad meetings

A large team will often find the teams meetings don't go as planned. 

People not working together as a team

Team not working together outside the meetings

Too much work in progress

A large team will often end up working on many different things at once

No one understands what is going on

Related practices

I.e. what can you do to solve this problem

Build feature teams

Split the team according to feature team principals. 

Common pitfalls to avoid:

Creating skillset teams

It might be tempting to split a big team into different skillsets. Like an analysis team and a development team. But this creates a new set of communication and dependency problems.

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