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What Project Team Size is Best?
Optimum size for project teams has been the object of conjecture for decades. Even the experts cannot agree. But they do agree it is not big. According to Fortune Magazine in 2006, it was 4.6. According to Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon, it is the number of people who can be fed with just two pizzas.
Clearly, this is not an exact science. As Evan Wittenberg, director of the Wharton Graduate Leadership Program, so aptly states, "It does tend to fall into the five to 12 range, though some say five to nine is best, and the number six has come up a few times."
However, just as clearly, every respectable study concludes it is not big. Small is beautiful. Beyond a certain number, probability of success falls off dramatically. And cost begins to increase exponentially.
Large teams are a great resource if you are digging a tunnel. In that case, the more shovels the better. But in complex corporate projects where communication is critical, too many lines of communication dramatically slow the project.
As the number of people increases linearly, the required lines of communication increase exponentially. The number of lines is n(n-1)/2, where n= the number of people on the team. A team of eight, therefore, has 28 lines of communication, while a team of 120 has an astounding 7,140. That's 255 times more complex! No wonder the probability of success falls as team size grows.
The small team principle holds true, no matter how large the intended output of the project. It may not seem logical, but adding more people will not appreciably improve the throughput or even the delivery date of a project.
In the late 1800s, Maximilian Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, discovered that the more people who pulled on a rope, the less effort each individual contributed. When there is a group of people, all performing the same task, there can be diminishing returns beyond just a few members.
In 1972 psychologist Ivan Steiner researched the effects of incrementally increasing the size of a team. Starting with one member and adding one at a time, he determined that each additional member increased the group's potential productivity but also introduced inefficiencies.
Group members became less motivated, and group coordination became much more difficult. Steiner demonstrated that team productivity peaked at about five. After that point, adding more members actually began to hurt the team's performance.
Quantitative Software Management (QSM) provides a more current example from today's complex world. Since 1978, they have led the software industry in estimation, project tracking and control, and software metrics analysis. In a study published in 2005, they used metrics from more than 7,000 completed projects to analyze productivity and error rates. The results were astounding but predictable, if we are to trust our experts:
* A two-person team develops 40,000 lines of code in 40 person-months.
* A 29-person team only improved the timeframe by 12 calendar days.
* The larger team produced six times as many defects as the small one.
QSM performed yet another study based on data they collected from 564 information systems projects completed since 2002.
* Teams with 34 people on average completed a 100,000-line project in 5.6 months at a cost of $2.1 million
* Teams of 4 people on average took about two weeks longer but cost just $294,000.
* Shaving two weeks off the schedule cost $1.84 million!
Books, articles, papers and studies have been published for decades, all coming to the same conclusion. More people applied to projects bring a greater decline in productivity and quality. It does seem logical that, for large projects, a large team is required but that is absolutely not the case.
About the Author Art Pennington is President of the Profit Research Institute, founder of four successful software companies, author, keynote speaker, holder of multiple patents, and creator of the "Profit Method" of business success. He can be reached online at: http://www.Small-Business-Software-Made-Easy.com
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