Team too big

Team too big
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com / Unsplash

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 -

Meetings get exponentially more expensive as team size increases as the meeting both needs to be longer to cover every bodies work and there are more attendees and with more people there is more chance of distraction.

Meeting effectiveness

A lot of the common format for team meetings start to break down.

Nobody cares

It is hard to care about the work of many other people that is not related to you. Team members loose interest. People get

Team to big is almost always a problem in its own right. But can occasionally can have related problems.

What to look for

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

Why is it bad?

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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. 

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

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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