Agile Team – Part 5 – The Team

Responses

1. 

   Kathy Rathbun October 4, 2017

   Hi Funke,

   The disadvantages can be:

   • Harder to communicate with one another if larger than 9 Team Members on your Team. You have to make extra effort.
   • Stand ups can go longer than the recommended 15 minutes. Team Members could be disengaged if stand up takes too long.
   • ScrumMaster has to ensure a healthy team; with 15 Team Members and their dysfunctional behavior and correcting that behavior (ie: late for stand up meetings, side conversations, etc.).
   • More coordination for ScrumMaster if Team Members are distributed and getting them all on Webex/Zoom/Bluejean/ etc. for meetings.
   • Harder facilitation for ScrumMaster during Agile meetings with a larger Team.
   • Maybe more difficult in reaching consensus on estimating, team norms, best practices, etc.
   • Small ‘cliques’ may form if teams are too big.
   • Your Sprint planning meetings may take longer since your Team is larger and should have a higher velocity
   • Your Story/Tasks boards could have 20-30 stories and 200-300 tasks. A lot to manage and ensure priority stories are done first. If you have a physical board, it may require a large area.
   • Your Demo could take longer since you have so many Team Members doing so much work.
   • Your Retros could take longer since you have so many Team Members. Some quieter Team Members may not feel comfortable speaking up.
   • It may take longer for your Team to move from Forming to Storming to Norming and then Performing.

   Does that help?

2. 

   Ash ADEOSUN June 10, 2019

   You are right Sally, a big team 15-20 can be a disaster. I was engaged with a team of 18! I knew we were set up for a fail. I struggled for 2 months. I got to understand the project and advised we spilt the team by business theme. Fortunately I had a very collaborative and understanding PO. We got 2 more team members and has 5 members for each business theme. (Inclusive of 2 Solution Architects who were responsible for 2 teams each). Then we had Team Leads who were quite knowledgeable on each theme. We ran 2 sprints each month and sync with the PO at SOS every month before major monthly release. The team was easier to manage as smaller units with focus than as a large group of 20. We were also able to achieve more.