Split teams into smaller ones to scale up delivery.

Problem: "Our squads are very large with 8 people or more, because that is what's needed to get the work done."

Software teams become large usually because organisations are delivering projects, and they load up teams with project work, then need additional capacity to meet deadlines. As a result, teams bloat into large gatherings of uncoordinated people and more "management" is applied to ensure people and teams are working hard.

The impact of large teams is lack of alignment and increased difficulty in communicating across a large group. The more people in the team, the more communication channels and opportunity for miscommunication and misalignment. Especially in remote and hybrid teams. See the video below for a live demonstration of how much interactions are involved around a small number of work items, and small team of people.

Possible solutions that you can use immediately:

➤ Instead of committing large amounts of project work to teams, break down the work using Discovery. Commit only small incremental objectives to teams.

➤ Build T-shaped team members within each team to overcome "We need 1 of everything on our team". Build full stack engineers and DevOps capabilities.

➤ Split teams into smaller sizes focussed on business domains, not tech skills. Maintain cross-functional teams.

➤ Learn to manage team interdependencies. Use Big Room Planning and Scrum of Scrums to coordinate, schedule and manage work across teams.

Video demonstration created by John Cutler - https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7307164461616742401/