Organizing & Scaling Agile Teams
January 16, 2019
Ask any scrum coach about ideal team size and you’ll likely get the same answer: 7 plus or minus−that is, 5 to 9 team members doing the actual planning and work of the sprint.
But is that true?
And if it is, what do we do when we think we need to add a 10th team member to an already-maxed-out 9-member team?
Splitting into two (or three!) teams seems fractious – siloing – so why would we cap teams at nine and split them at 10?
To add to this conundrum, what do we do when part of our team is local and part remote? Or when our entire team is scattered? How do we organize for the best results?
Ron Lichty’s mantra is that software development is a team sport, which means that what gates productivity is communication. In this webinar, he’ll speak to organizing teams for effectiveness, productivity and joy.
On demand recording
Meet our panelists
Ron Lichty
Ron Lichty consults with software and product teams and organizations to make software development “hum”. Ron’s book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net), published by Addison Wesley, has been compared by many readers to programming classics The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware. His Live Lessons: Managing Software People and Teams video training for managers is available via O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf. Ron also co-authors the periodic Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting, Inc. (www.RonLichty.com), he has trained teams in Scrum, transitioned teams from waterfall to agile, coached teams already using agile to make their software development “hum”, and trained managers in managing software people and teams. He takes on interim VP Engineering roles and to other clients provides VPE-level guidance and advice to untangle the knots in software development and transform chaos to clarity.
Take a look at Scaling Scrum
He has led teams and organizations at companies like Apple Computer, Fujitsu, Charles Schwab, Avenue A / Razorfish, Forensic Logic, Stanford, Check Point, and dozens of startups of all sizes. He co-chairs the Silicon Valley Engineering Leadership Community. Ron lives in San Francisco and Seattle.
