Manage It!

Know How Large a Team You Need

The only thing worse than trying to complete a project with not enough people is trying to manage a project with a too-large team and inadequate management infrastructure. You can manage a team of up to nine people by yourself, although teams larger than six people tend to break into subgroups naturally. If you have a team larger than nine people, you need to have some technical leads or other project managers, depending on the deliverables.

There’s a reason for the number nine. Cockburn (Agile Software Development [Coc01]), explains that when the team gets this large the team dynamic changes. Larger teams are not intimate teams (Phillips, and Weinberg^[26]) who have interdependent deliverables; they are groups ...