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Team Size.

Last post 06:30 pm March 6, 2017 by Wan Kemper
4 replies
06:38 am February 15, 2017

In Agile projects, generally how would one assess as to how many members a team should have. We know the Scrum Guide the ideal team size is between 3 - 9 members. How do we assess up front if the team needs to be closer to 9 or closer to 3.

What are the parameters one can look at to assess this.

  


06:43 pm February 15, 2017

Consider the incremental deliveries which are likely to be of value to the Product Owner. How often will the PO expect them, and what level of quality will be required?

Once an appreciation of demand appetite is reached, the skills that will be needed to produce a usable increment can be assessed.

It's then a matter of mapping the skills to the available people who can, as a team, deliver those increments to the expected level of quality each Sprint. Ideally developers will self-organize to form these teams and will not be assigned by others.


04:58 pm February 17, 2017

Great question. One main parameter i use is the length of the production chain in terms of competences. To succesfully deliver value i try to get the complete production chain of the product in 1 team. Sometimes the chain is to long, the team will have more than 9 members to facilitate the chain. Then the team members must decide what is the best split. Or try to reduce the length by learning more competences per team member.

Do other use this parameter? What are pro's and cons?


06:07 am February 20, 2017

Hi Wan,

Could you elaborate with an example. Not sure if I quite understood the meaning of Production Chain.

Thanks.

 


06:30 pm March 6, 2017

Sorry for the late reply, been elsewhere in the meantime.

I see the production chain as the number of expertises needed to deliver value in a particular situation. For instance, we have in our team now members that are good in: - frontend development, content management, online metrics, SEO and business analyses.

Together they form a chain of expertises that is overall very effective. We miss now on the expertise of testing. We are doing tests, but we are not very good at it:). So we are in for a team member that is good in testing.


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