Disciplined Agile

Avoiding Large Agile Teams

Luckily, there are several strategies that you can employ to reduce the size of a team:

  1. Reorganize the problem into a collection of smaller problems. Disaggregation of a large problem is performed through a combination of agile envisioning and agile business analysis. This is a key responsibility of your product management efforts: to feed reasonably-sized portions, called minimum business increments (MBIs), of work to your teams.
  2. Reduce the problem. Sometimes a large problem can be shrunk down through pruning features out of the vision, or at least by deferring them until later.
  3. Address your organization’s culture. As we discussed earlier, most of the reasons that organizations build large teams are the result of cultural challenges. We suggest that you fix the real problem by adopting a Disciplined Agile® Mindset and evolving your way of working (WoW), thereby motivating an evolution of your culture.
  4. Organize the large team into a collection of smaller teams. In other words, create a program.
  5. Adopt a Disciplined Agile approach. Enable your teams, regardless of size, to choose their own way of working (WoW) and thus have a process that addresses the needs of the situation that they face. Some people call this process right-sizing, de-scaling, or process disaggregation – we simply call it pragmatic.

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