Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, customer focus, continual improvement, six sigma.
August 20, 2008
The Power of Small Teams

The power of small teams by Avi Muchnick

Choose a project that is simple to implement. Don’t try to create a complex suite of applications… Focus on solving a single problem. Philip Kaplan made email more efficient to use by stalling it instead of managing it. Dead simple approach and a great idea.Take the easier approach when possible.

Choose people that can wear multiple hats. Can your designer code? Can your programmer manage a community? Can your marketing guru fund raise? Can one guy do it all?

All documentation should be available via a central location. A wiki can work really well for this purpose. Good documentation lessens the loss from communication failures.

Arrange your workspace in common areas. Segregating your team in different offices is a recipe for lost communication data and with it, a need for additional people. You’d be surprised at how many roles can be shared by multiple people, so long as they have the ability to communicate instantly and unimpeded with each other. Put people between walls, and those shared tasks will need to be managed by additional team members.

Amazon and Google do a lot with small teams and I think they have it right. I have worked on small IT teams for several years now and find it great. Combine with agile management methods small teams allow for great focus (you are naturally guided toward appropriate project sizes instead of huge monster projects), great results and joy in work. I have no desire to work in large teams.

Related: Team Handbook - Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations - Keeping Track of Improvement Opportunities - Curious Cat Management Articles

Leave a Reply



Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog © curiouscat.com 2005-2008 powered by WordPress

Internal Links

Author

John Hunter

Tags


Full tag could

Other

Search Blog

Web Search

Management Improvement web search

Recent Comments

  • Anonymous: Insightful. I like this. Will try to see whether the information provided herein is useful or not by the...
  • Tim: Our state passed a law a few years back making it illegal to import drugs from canada, isn’t that a...
  • Shawn: I agree completely. The mainstream press is either lazy, biased, or both, and reports manufacturing job loses...
  • Doug Mikaelian: I couldn’t agree more about “saying no” to individual incentives. But I also...
  • Ian Pratt: Great article and so true, the best management book I have ever read was 15 years old, the surprising...
  • Colleen: I hate that TV program TMZ, but I was thinking they could do some good for a change by harrassing those...
  • shaun sayers: Couldn’t agree more with your view on new management books. However when you have a good long...
  • Anonymous: Another one of Google’s open source projects is Google Chrome. Its one good browser and is where you...

Archives

August 2008
M T W T F S S
« Jul   Sep »
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031