Agile Team – Part 5 – The Team

2 Comments
  • AgileVideos
    Posted at 12:53h, 04 October

    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?

  • Ash ADEOSUN
    Posted at 14:06h, 10 June

    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.

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