Agile Notes (No. 5)

Every week, on Fridays, I will send out an email highlighting a concept relating to Agile/Scrum/Continuous Improvement. Here we go…..

We are continuing with some notes from The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck by Em Campbell-Pretty and Adrienne L. Wilson. ART is short for Agile Release Train and is a concept from Scaled Agile.

I love this picture.

The authors recommend team sizes of 7 +/1 2 people. This picture from page 68 of the book does an excellent job showing the complexity of lines of communication as your team size grows. Each dot is a team member. A 5-person team has 10 lines of comms. A 7-person team has 21 lines. A 9-person has 36 lines. Keep it simple!

Oh! And a team member can only be on ONE TEAM!

This formula works well for almost any type of team if you think about it. I remember being a young supervisor in a call center providing support for internet connectivity. By design, each supervisor had 11-12 people on their team. The graphic for 12 people above shows the challenge.

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