Project Management

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Ideal Project Team Size

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Delaney Van Vranken Texas Association of Counties Austin, Tx, United States
Hi All,

My organization has a problem with creating massive project teams. Every executive feels like they need a representative from every team in their department and when we try to limit the number of people on a project they get mad and say their department isn't adequately represented. One time I had a project team of 35 people which is 20% of the entire organization. Its difficult to schedule meetings, come to decisions, and no one contributes anything because its simply too many people.

Does anyone have a recommendation for how I can approach the executive team to convince them we need smaller project teams and make sure they still feel adequately represented? Does anyone have good articles explaining why smaller teams sizes are more productive that I could use to back up my argument?
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Kiron Bondale Retired | Mentor| Retired Welland, Ontario, Canada
Delaney -

Are these folks actually doing something or are they just providing input or needing to be informed. It is reasonable that there will be lots of stakeholders on a pan-company project, but that doesn't mean they are all part of the team.

Educating your leadership team about the challenge in keeping larger teams aligned (you could use the Nx(n-1)/2 formula) and tools such as a RACI might help to work through this.

Kiron
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1 reply by Delaney Van Vranken
May 09, 2022 11:44 AM
Delaney Van Vranken
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They're mostly just contributing an opinion, but most don't end up saying anything and its difficult to get contributions.

Since this is how we do projects most people are overloaded with too many projects and don't have the capacity to give the project the attention it deserves. People miss a lot meetings, don't read through important documentation, and don't come prepared to meetings.
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Stéphane Parent Self Employed / Semi-retired| Leader Maker Prince Edward Island, Canada
The trick is to build communications from the teams outward, as well as inward. For my last project, we used advisory groups to support specific Scrum teams. We also made sure that product owners were responsible for ratifying their decisions with the business organization.

Show the executives how the teams will communicate back to them and you will solve a big part of your problem.

The big caveat: be careful that communications don't turn into work reviews/approvals. That's what your iteration work review ceremony is for.
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Delaney Van Vranken Texas Association of Counties Austin, Tx, United States
May 06, 2022 4:58 PM
Replying to Kiron Bondale
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Delaney -

Are these folks actually doing something or are they just providing input or needing to be informed. It is reasonable that there will be lots of stakeholders on a pan-company project, but that doesn't mean they are all part of the team.

Educating your leadership team about the challenge in keeping larger teams aligned (you could use the Nx(n-1)/2 formula) and tools such as a RACI might help to work through this.

Kiron
They're mostly just contributing an opinion, but most don't end up saying anything and its difficult to get contributions.

Since this is how we do projects most people are overloaded with too many projects and don't have the capacity to give the project the attention it deserves. People miss a lot meetings, don't read through important documentation, and don't come prepared to meetings.
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Aaron Porter
Community Champion
IT Director| Blade HQ Payson, UT, United States
It sounds like most of them might be grateful if they didn't have to attend every meeting. How frequently are you meeting? Are you able to break out smaller groups of people you need to get work done, with a more frequent cadence for the larger group?
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Thomas Walenta Global Project Economy Expert Hackenheim, Germany
Delany,

for a single project to have this team size, and the members are fully allocated to that project, I recommend to break the team in to sub-teams of around 8 and assign one person as team leader and being the interface to other teams, the customer and the PM.

There is psychological research indicating that optimal team size is around 7-8, if everybody has the need to communicate with everyone else. And must communicate, so it is harder to hide.

Since people seem not to be 100% allocated to one project, this can only be resolved by implementing portfolio management, setting priorities and let everyone know what to work on.

Another technique would be using critical chain, which forces people to work on task 100% until they are completed. Multitasking kills progress.

Thomas

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