Diminishing Returns

What is the optimal size of a project team?

What is the optimal size of a meeting?

These questions have plagued people for years.  The egotists/dictators amongst the crowd will think that the best number is one.  If there is no one else to discuss things with then you will always get your way.  Unfortunately, getting your way is not always the best solution for the client, so we need to have at least two people.  Indeed, for most projects there will be multiple people involved ranging from project managers to developers to business analysts to the actual clients themselves.  So what's the answer?

I was reading an email this morning which mentioned getting business analysts, project managers, clients, Directors, project teams and the Deployment Team involved in a "little" project.  I almost collapsed when I read that part of the note, fearing a room that contained twenty five people, all of whom wanted their voices heard and none of whom were willing to budge.  I was quite relieved when I read the next couple of sentences and realized that the writer understood the "Law of Diminishing Returns" (The larger the group involved, the less likely you are to get consensus.) and had provided the solution:  representatives.  (Hey, this kind of sounds like democracy in action, doesn't it?)

Trim down the size of the meeting to a smaller number (research has shown that five to seven people is the best, with seven being a fairly firm upper limit) and have the people in the group represent various segments of the prospective user groups.  For larger projects the same sort of segmentation and representation also works wonderfully.  Split the overall project into small teams working on a specific problem.  Have related teams grouped together where a representative from each team will have a voice in a larger collaborative group.  This has worked well for major companies like Microsoft and IBM and consulting firms like Accenture.

The root concept is the same, however, keep teams relatively small in order to reduce the number of nodes of communication that each person is subject to and to improve the the overall feeling of ownership.