Designing hi

1. Less is more !
Ebin John
ebinjp@hotmail.com
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2. What are we talking about!
• Relation between team size and productivity
• Some factors affecting “Team Dynamics”
• Why we do what we do!
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3. How many of you have designed
teams?
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4. Designing teams for:
• Optimum
– Productivity
– Motivation
– Transparency
– Collaboration
– Communication
–Size
– Etc.
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5. Why the team size different?
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6. The number of people on a team
has significant impact on
performance
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7. People's efforts quickly diminish as
team size increases : Ringelmann Effect
Individual contribution is inversely proportional
to the size and magnitude of a group.
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8. Rope Pulling Exercise
• 4 people pulled a rope
• Then 4 more people joined to pull the same rope
8 People didn’t pull as strong as 4
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9. Ringelmann concluded this productivity
decrease as loss of motivation and
coordination problems.
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10. Is it only that?
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11. Another Experiment: Alan Ingham
It didn't seem to matter whether people were part of a larger
team or simply thought they were part of a larger team
they worked less hard.
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12. Not only Co-ordination Issues, Motivation but
also Social Loafing is contributing to the
productivity decrease.
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13. Social Loafing
The reduction in individual effort when people
work in groups compared to when they work
alone.
Team members reduced their effort because
they feel less responsible for the output.
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14. Parameters Of Social Loafing
• Social Facilitation
• Social Influence
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15. Social Facilitation
Tendency for people to do better on simple
tasks in the presence of other people.
Degrade the performance of less familiar tasks!
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_facilitation15

16. Any Incidents?
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17. Social Influence
Occurs when one's emotions, opinions, or
behaviors are affected by others
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18. Social Influence
• Compliance : when people appear to agree
with others, but actually keep their dissenting
opinions private.
• Identification : when people are influenced by
someone who is liked and respected, such as a
famous celebrity.
• Internalization : when people accept a belief
or behavior and agree both publicly and
privately.
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19. Conformance to the expectations of others.
– Informational social influence : the need to be right.
– Normative social influence : the need to be liked.
Psychological Factors
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20. Relation with Agile ceremonies
• Planning
– Task break down
– Estimation
• Grooming
• Demo
• Retrospection
• ?
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21. What is the ideal number?
• Researches suggests that , people tend to
prefer teams of four or, at most, five
members.
• Context matters.
– Tasks variety, Multi skills, Over heads, etc.
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22. All other things being equal, that small teams
are more likely to optimize their performance
when faced with slightly fewer members than
the task at hand requires.
Small teams are more effective!
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23. Not doing anything isn't an option
The team members you risk losing aren't the
weakest but highest performers.
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What can we do about it?

24. What are the other options?
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25. Option 1
• Divide up a complex task into manageable
bits, where every member of the team is
accountable for one bit of it.
Source: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum/task-boards
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26. Option 2
Generate a sense of urgency
Provided that people are capable, all one needs
to do is to give them something to care about
more than themselves.
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27. Option 3
Make weaker team members feel
disproportionately responsible for the team
underperforming.
The Köhler Effect:
No one wants to be the weakest link of any group. As a result,
weaker individuals in the group respond to this by expending more
effort than they would had they been working alone.
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28. Option 4
Provide greater transparency by opening up
your feedback mechanism.
Make things painfully visible.
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29. What are the value adds!
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30. Questions / Comments
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31. Thank you 
Email:ebinjp@hotmail.com
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32. References
• http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/why_less_is_more_in_teams.html
• http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/04/agile-optimal-team-size
• http://www.jrothman.com/blog/mpd/2009/12/ideal-team-size-and-
ratios.html
• http://www.sixsigmatraining.org/miscellaneous/what-is-the-optimum-
team-size.html
• http://www.belbin.com/?id=73&pressid=31
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33. Appendix
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34. • Four "We're well-balanced in our team and good at
achieving agreement."
• Five "One of us tends to be the odd one out."
• Six "It takes longer to reach agreement, but we get
there in the end."
• Seven "Rather too many random contributions float
about."
• Eight "People speak freely but no one listens."
• Nine "We could do with someone taking control."
• Ten "We now have a leader, but their ideas are the only
ones with a chance of acceptance."
Source: http://www.belbin.com/?id=73&pressid=31
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35. Context
• The purpose for forming the team,
• The expectations you have of the team and its
members,
• The roles that the team members need to play,
• The amount of cohesiveness and
interconnectivity necessary for optimal team
performance, and
• The function, activities, and goals of the team.
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