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.
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.
AgileVideos
Posted at 12:53h, 04 OctoberHi Funke,
The disadvantages can be:
Does that help?
Ash ADEOSUN
Posted at 14:06h, 10 JuneYou 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.