{"id":1258,"date":"2018-07-03T05:41:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-03T11:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=1258"},"modified":"2021-01-26T23:22:04","modified_gmt":"2021-01-27T06:22:04","slug":"team-communication-costs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/team-communication-costs\/","title":{"rendered":"Team Communication Costs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>People often ask me, how big should an improvement team be? My answer: as small as possible.<\/p>\n<p>In Fred Brooks\u2019 <em>Mythical Man Month<\/em>, he points out that communication pathways increase in a nonlinear fashion. The formula is simple:<\/p>\n<p><em>(n<sup>2<\/sup>-n)\/2<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Where <em>n<\/em> is the number of people on a team.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>2 people = 1 connection (4-2)\/2<\/li>\n<li>3 people = 3 connections (9-3)\/2<\/li>\n<li>4 people = 6 connections (16-4)\/2<\/li>\n<li>5 people = 10 connections (25-5)\/2<\/li>\n<li>6 people = 15 connections (36-6)\/2<\/li>\n<li>7 people = 21 connections (49-7)\/2<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The bigger the team, the more time is spent on discussion and communication, not progress.<\/p>\n<p>The bigger the team, the more chance there is for confusion, scope broadening and other team disfunctions. <em>More is not always merrier<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Smaller teams will also come up with better, tighter countermeasures and solutions.<\/p>\n<p>How big should a team be? If you\u2019ve laser-focused the team using data, 3-5 team members should do it.<\/p>\n<p>Should you ever add people to an improvement team after it\u2019s started? To paraphrase Brooks\u2019 Law: <em>Adding people to a late improvement project, makes it later.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Small tight teams will make more progress than large cumbersome ones.<\/p>\n<p><em>Never choose teams before analysis<\/em>. Let your data analysis dictate the people who need to be on the team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>People often ask me, how big should an improvement team be? My answer: as small as possible. In Fred Brooks&rsquo; Mythical Man Month, he points out that communication pathways increase in a nonlinear fashion. The formula is simple: (n2-n)\/2 Where n is the number of people on a team. 2 people = 1 connection (4-2)\/2 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,3,7],"tags":[288,168,287],"class_list":["post-1258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jay-arthur-blog","category-lean","category-six-sigma","tag-communication","tag-qi-macros","tag-team"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1258"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3982,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions\/3982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}