Productivity

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Team size: Why size matters

I keep wondering what the right size for teams is. It is common sense that a person alone is never as effective as a team. The reason is simple: When we are alone, we tend to loose sight of what really matters and we might not come up with the best ideas/solutions. Therefore, it is a good idea to have more opinions/minds to “do the right things”.

However, too many people tend to make the collaboration inefficient (“doing the things right”) as communication complexity multiplies. For knowledge workers I think there is some truth to the saying that:

  • Two workers can do three times as much work as one
  • Three workers can do four times as much work as one
  • Four workers can do four times as much work as one
What does that mean for team size? Doing simple math and maximizing outcome this would lead to teams of two. However, in my experience the right size for teams to get things done is three (yeah, I hear you saying that science says different – 5 to 7 or even 9 – but that’s my experience). Best if all three have a slightly different background. If you are a software team, then put together designers with engineers (and maybe a product guy). That should enhance effectiveness and consequently overall productivity even more.

If the chunks of work are too big to digest for a team of three, cut them down to make them fit. You can always do less in one iteration. However, I am a big fan of self-organization. Thus, let the team members choose the right size. If they want to cut a team of seven in teams of three and four, let them do it. If they want to work as a team of seven, let them try that.

In the end the right team size depends largely on the environment/culture. As far as the success and performance of teams goes, it is the attention to quality, capability and attitude that counts. Also communication and status transparency is crucial. But that’s a topic for a future post.

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Try scrum to manage your todos and get things done

Many companies are starting to adapt agile methods to manage their (software) projects. Here is an interesting approach about using scrum principles to manage your personal life.

Click to view large
To-Do Scrum
  • Each day is a Sprint
  • To-Do items not due today form the Product Backlog
  • To-Do items due today form the Sprint Backlog
  • Completed To-Do items are considered Done
  • Overdue To-Do items are considered Failed Items and are re-prioritised
  • Each morning take 10-15 minutes to do Sprint Planning
  • Each evening take 10-15 minutes to do Sprint Review & Retrospective
  • When completing a To-Do item take 5 minutes to do Stand Up
I’m also trying out the Pomodoro Technique to help reduce the multi-tasking and focus on single tasks in contiguous blocks. Not sure how comfortable I am with this yet – bit apprehensive about potentially excessive routine which could reduce flexibility. Probably just need to practice it a bit more and find the balance that works for me.
via kimstevens.posterous.com

 

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E-Mail is (very often) not an efficient way of communicating: 10 Proposals for Fixing E-Mail (from NY Times)

1. Add reply buttons for YES, NO and MAYBE.

Some messages just don’t need a comprehensive reply. If someone e-mails me and asks if I’m available to attend a meeting, rather than take the time to write back with a detailed response, why can’t I just click a YES, NO, or MAYBE button? One click and the e-mail has been dealt with.

2. Use browsing history in a smart way.
When people send me news items or blog posts, my e-mail program could check my Web browser history to see if I’ve already been to this specific URL. If so, the message should skip my in-box.

3. Add the ability to take yourself out of the reply chain.

I regularly send messages to introduce friends or co-workers to each other. These introductions are usually the standard “Hi Jane, I’d like to introduce you to Bob.” After a connection is established, I’m often forced to sit on the sidelines getting a barrage of messages as Jane and Bob converse. It would be great if I could preemptively remove my address from these replies.

4. Crowdsource the problem.
O.K., I know this one is a stretch, but what about crowdsourcing my in-box — opening it up to the general public? Then, when I get that forwarded e-mail from a co-worker announcing that the government will start taxing people for every e-mail they send, someone else could respond explaining that, sadly, this is actually fake. This scheme would require correspondents to label personal or private notes that would then stay out of the crowdsourcing zone.

5. Eliminate the “reply-to-all” feature.

Ah, the reply-to-all e-mail faux pas: You’re invited to an event via a large group e-mail and one person responds to everyone with a pointless “Great, I’ll be there!” If a cold-blooded extermination of this feature is too radical, maybe we could require a stern CAUTION alert whenever someone attempts a reply-to-all.

6. If the e-mail is important, it will find me.

Real-time services like Twitter and FriendFeed illustrate the potential usefulness of a streaming interface. I don’t have to see all the tweets in my stream; if something is specifically important it will be re-tweeted by people in my network. The more this happens, the better the chance that I will eventually see it. What if we made e-mail into a stream? If a message is important, people can re-mail it, and it then moves back to the top of the list.

7. Cut off anything longer than 140 characters.
Speaking of Twitter, do we really need more than 140 characters for most messages? E-mail applications could add a button that would cut off all content longer than 140 characters.

8. E-mail software intelligence.
E-mail applications are essentially dumb clients. They don’t know much about you, or your e-mail, and if they do, they don’t use this data to help manage the content. There are people working on this problem and coming up with solutions like Kwaga, a semantic-language enhancement for your e-mail. But there could be other additions to these smart clients. For example, let’s say my e-mail application understands that I have an @nytimes.com address. During the day other @nytimes messages could receive higher levels of attention than mail from my wife or brother-in-law. In the evening, this rule could flip, placing work messages on the back burner.

9. Create an “Auto Filter” button.

Clay Shirky, author of the book “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” believes that “we don’t have information overload; we have filter failure.” I completely agree with this, but creating filters can become a chore too. My solution would add a single-click button called Auto Filter. Once pressed, it would do its best to analyze the message and create a new filter, and then file future messages into this new category.

10. A monthly word limit.
We have limits on Internet bandwidth, and surcharges to limit the number of minutes we can talk on our cellphones. Why not limit the number of words an e-mail account can pump out each month? (If you go over, that new government e-mail tax kicks in …)

via bits.blogs.nytimes.com

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