 Just a very short introduction about myself, my name is Eben John. I work as an agile coach with Society General Global Solutions Center. As an agile coach, I had worked with companies like Nokia Siemens Networks, GE, Alcatel Lucent, Waltech, etc. So I am interested in NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming and little bit of behavioral and psychological aspects of human beings. So one of the Harvard review, which actually inspired me to create this particular deck, this is the first time I am delivering this topic in half an hour. So I have to maximize your value add, I have removed couple of things, some exercises, etc. So let us bear with me and let us see how can we create more value add, yep. To help you to use your low of 2 feet, I will first straight away tell you what is the objective. The one of the objective is to establish the or throw some light into this relation between size and productivity. And the second one is about some factors affecting the team dynamics. And with that context, how these things are getting affected in some of the ceremonies what we do as part of our scrum or agile principles, yep. So how many of you have design teams, how lot of managers around here? So normally when we think about designing a team, what are the things we normally think about? We want to have everything optimum, optimum productivity, optimum motivation, transparency, collaboration, lot of things, right. We work, we do lot of homework when before we create a team. It is not that every Tom Dick and Harry can come into a group and then we call it a team, right. But today we are focusing more on size. How the size impact on productivity. So if you look around in the different places in our day to day lives, we see in sports different games of different team sizes. You have baseball nine people, basketball five, cricket 11. Many times you would have taken this for granted. We are not questioning why there is different team sizes. So but it is almost certain that the team size have significant impact on performance. So there are lot of people did lot of studies to identify what is the real relation, what is the optimum number, etc. So I am throwing some light into this and probably you have lot of ideas about that already and it is a debatable topic anyway. So let us look at what I have. So there is a scientist, a French scientist called Ringelman have done some studies and it is now known as Ringelman effect. He says that the size of the group diminishes the performance. The bigger the group the lesser the performance which normally not the way we think because many times we had we heard stories okay if you cannot meet the deadline add couple more people finish it off and we know in for practical reasons it is not working that way. So individual performance is inversely proportional to the productivity but it cannot go to zero and say that okay if there is nobody or one person can create everything. That is also not true. So there is a down limit and there is an upper limit. So what he have done to in order to arrive into this conclusion? He have done some exercise pretty interesting it is a rope pulling exercise. He asked four people to pull a rope and he measured the tension at the other end. Then he asked four more people to join. So they pulled the rope and he guess us about the result yeah yes eight people could not pull as strong as four people thought provoking isn't it. So he concluded this as loss of coordination. So we know that when we add more people we get into a lot of coordination problem. So he concluded yes this could be a coordination problem but is it only that I think we end up having lot of incidents in similar lines where we add more people into the team and we don't get the result even in fact the outcome will reduce even in the keynote speak yesterday Craig was talking about 250 people working instead of 25 people because many times we have wrong matrix where the manager is measured with the number of people who is reporting to him. We have lot of examples about that. So there is another exercise conducted on top of this it's an extension to this university professor called Alan Ingham have done similar exercise and he have got similar results but he added a small twist. So what happened was in the same row pulling exercise when he asked other people to join he said you don't have to pull it just pretend as if you are pulling what would have happened it irrespective of whether I am part of a big team if I or I thought as part of a big team I work less hard because I feel less responsible about the outcome. I have less ownership I am not very much accountable so he concluded yes it's not only the coordination there is something else called social offing I think many people could relate to social offing here. So coordination is another topic which probably we all try to find different tools to get it through let's look more into the social offing which is pretty interesting for me because when I do a research on this stuff I realized why I behave in certain way in certain circumstances at this moment I am a victim of social offing my hand is you know so it's it's part of it. So social offing is a phenomena where the there is a reduction when you work with larger group you when you work alone you would have produced certain result but when you work in a big group you will tend to produce lesser result so there are lot of aspects to it the main thing is as we discussed the responsibility factor and so if you go deeper into social offing social offing consist of two major parameters one is social facilitation and another one is social influence so we will go dive into it and we will like to see I actually really want to open up what really make us do many things in for example like say you would have met lot of people in the last two days when you had discussion especially me when I had discussion with couple of people I tend to say yes yes yes even though I don't understand and I end up asking wrong questions because I asked him which company do you work for he will say one company name and I didn't understand I didn't I didn't catch because lot of lot of lot of companies right so it was not a familiar name for me and after some time we had lot of discussion about the way you work etc at the end I will ask the question again which company work for it so you understand the you know he will say ok I am talking to the wrong guy he will just go away right ok so about social facilitation it is a tendency for people to do better on simple task on the other hand the performance performance will degrade a task which is less familiar for example I am agile coach I preach about manifesto most of the time who are I meet who is in working waterfall oh you work in waterfall why not agile I can preach about it because I know I know the things pretty clearly at least I am confident about it so I am not worried I do a good job and when there are more people joining the joining to listen to me I will I will get a boost I will get more confidence but the moment somebody asked me to fix a J unit test code I will get into trouble I am not very familiar so say suppose with all the knowledge I have I was a programmer so probably I could fix it but I would have taken some time if I given all the freedom to sit and understand this Google it do something right but if there is somebody watching me then that is going to go down most of the time I will be thinking about you see seeing me professional coach and if he if he know that I do not know about J unit it is a problem right how many times we get into such situation we talk about micromanagement many times this is exactly what happens when manager come and sit on your lap and then look at your monitor all the time ok let me see how you are progressing you get a call every time every half an hour somebody will ping you what is it what happens is it working is it working so you you create a pressure and which will internally take the outcome out of you ok let us move on social influence again another interesting stuff and by the way it is not only about our work life is applicable outside also probably which you can relate to social influence is when emotions opinions and behavior of one person is affected by others or a group so it has couple of more factors it has three general factors and two psychological factors let us see what are they the first one is about complaints when people appear to agree with the crowd even though they have a difference of opinion for example I am talking about something and it seems like everybody is agreeing because everybody is attending everybody is laughing and clapping so one person have a difference of opinion he just suppress it because I do not want to be the odd man out right so it is a it is a phenomena it is not only working with me it is it is with everybody so just relax so second one is about identification when you have a celebrity who whom do you think that he knows everything about that particular topic and when he talks about it you tend to do you know ok yeah it may be true for example Sachin Tendulkar talking about batting probably you do not go and challenge him that you know what you say is not right yeah and the third one is about internalization this is also have some connection with what we discussed today morning where sorry Mary Papandik was talking about self-fulfilling prophecies when you are a kid you started singing you do you are not worried about who is watching you you do not have any social influence at that point of time you are not aware so you started singing but your father probably I don't know whether father or mother who have more understanding about singing he'll say oh that's not the way you can't sing come on you're my kid right so he started taking that thought and internalizing that okay I can't sing I'm not a programmer I'm not good at doing that I'm not good I'm good at doing this I'm not good at talking to people different things when many people start giving you that input inputs you will internalize that and that become one of your belief and end up being a blocker for you okay so moving on to the psychological aspects so there are two things one is informational social influence and normative social influence the informational social influence is the need to be right this is one phenomena which probably kicks in many times in many meetings right I coined in the term where probably somebody had challenged and then I end up having a lot of discussion with them and eventually I realize yes there is a problem with my idea but I put it through so I need to you know win it'll become a competition and the end of the day you will get into very wrong wrong outputs very wrong decisions right for example like say outside you go to temple and you have no much idea about how to behave inside a temple what you normally do you look at a person other person who is actually you know looks like familiar to the setup and the way he behaves is something which you are going to mimic so you you have an inherent psychological need to be right and the second portion is about normative social influence so the need to be liked this is something which kicks in in most of the ceremonies which we do probably I am anyway going back and I trading through our ceremonies and how these are affecting that but here when somebody is say a senior member the product owner is talking about the feature he's coin he's telling that this is a feature which we use a need probably you may have a better idea right but you want to cut him you don't challenge him for different reasons on the other side like say come out of our office your girlfriend is asking how do I look the need to be liked comes out say wonderful yeah I think wonderful you're realizing that yes so moving on see why am I talking all these psychological stuffs behavioral stuff here how why how is it affecting and how what is the connection between the agile way of doing things and this informational social law thing social influence etc so if you think about different things what we do on a daily basis on a weekly basis in iterative basis like say for example task background estimation why do you think when we do poker planning we estimate and keep it down because you don't want to get influenced why do you think in grooming meetings or rather many times if you go I worked as a consultant or I consulted companies for specification by example so when you go to the teams and then ask them what are the biggest challenge you have they say requirement understanding the requirement so did you did you have a grooming meeting yes but what happened there we thought we assumed we assumed that this is that this is that way this is this way etc because we don't tend to ask questions because we don't we don't like challenging people because we think that if I challenge them they may not like me things kicking in again all these psychological things are coming in actually couple of times in every day in different situations so being aware aware of that itself can help you to see what is the reality so we are heading about the ideal number what's the ideal number any guesses 8 7 5 5 okay so yeah we can have a debate maybe probably anyway we have after this we have a coffee break so we can debate about it but in the research which I have done the ideal number turned to be 4 to 5 so anything smaller than 4 is too less to be effective anything more than 5 6 is going to be too big we know that different situation for example I say take an accident situation where somebody met with an accident and fallen down if there is only three or four people it's very likely that that person will get a help but if you have a huge crowd most of the time everybody will just look around and then go back yeah so but depending on the context it can change because we talk about cross functionality self-organizing and for different purpose we create team so the context matters but anything more than 6 7 is going to be a problem we know that we already experienced that and today just before me there was a talk about are we there yet by Islam so he was also talking about he's shown us a couple of case studies in one of the case study it was surprising to me that a team had five people five people created 80% of work completed 80% of the work but 20 people team could complete only 50% many time we don't you know connect with that because we have very funny studies project management or product management does lot of funny things like say one lady can produce a kid in nine months nine ladies can produce nine kids in nine months why not nine ladies in one month produce one kid this is the way they ask questions right okay let's move on so small teams are more effective when given the same circumstances if people are capable they tend to self-organize better the synergy will be much more when we have small teams so changing size may not be an option now okay fine we understand everything we will tend to you know look it look at it when we start a new team but currently we are working with a lot of teams what can we do about it I have some suggestions probably which some of them you already practice but let's look at it but doing nothing is not an option because all these overheads will sit on the highest performance and those are the guys who get you know because of social offering the people who are getting affected are the highest performers and they will it's risky for you right so the other options one option number one is about creating small task and make each one accountable so this is what we do as part of our scrum taskboat we have small task when the moment somebody picks it up and move it to the in progress state we'll write the name so we will make him accountable for it the moment you have your name attached to it and hanging around in the in progress state for more than two three days it's a problem right you feel a little worried I had friends who comes to the scrum meeting and talk for around three minutes and they will have the same story hanging around there because they think that just full the system by selling that I did this I did do I did that I helped them I helped them I was showing probes solving problem for somebody else etc will actually create an impression but the moment you see things are hanging in the board which will actually tell you something and second is about creating a sense of urgency if you have read about quotas principle this is the first thing he talked about create a sense of urgency it's not about pushing people to work on late night it's about giving them something to care more than themselves right when you have when you know that you have you don't have any deadlines you don't have any time or nobody is waiting then you tend to book your film movie tickets than looking at some something you know some breaking code so try to give them a little sense of urgency which can motivate them positively but you have to sense it and the third one is about making the weaker link in the team responsible for the teams outcome so nobody want to be the weakest link in the team so there is a principle of effect called caller effect where the moment a weaker link is exposed he'll try to catch up with other people so eventually the outcome of the team that group outcome will improve and the fourth option is about providing greater transparency opening up your feedback system 360 degree feedback you know making things painfully visible that's what we talk most of the time right in agile we use visual methods and make things visible so that people will feel that yeah I'm not doing good so you have information radiators in and around the development places very many look at it you'll see a red light then you will know you know I need to fix something or something is breaking I need to do something about it so that will give you an intrinsic motivation to do a fixing okay yeah it when I say responsibility it it is not about giving them some power to do some changes it's about making him responsible for the failure the team is not proceeding as it would have if you perform better so we are going to make him understand that if you take little more ownership things are going to move faster so we will make him realize that yeah there is a problem and I'm noticing that itself can give you a kind of a kick so that answer a question so I'm just trying to summarize so I know that I've put a lot of things together because we had limited time and I want to yes I want to maximize your value right so the first one we spoke about team size and productivity and we have seen that it's inversely proportional and we have seen that the number is 4 to 5 or maximum 6 and later we have seen that when the team size grows what are the factors which is affecting and we looked deeper into the social laughing phenomena we have seen that social facilitation and social influence how this is getting affected as on a daily basis in a work life as well as our personal life and we have seen couple of options which can be used currently now and try to improve your current situation probably it can help you in realizing some additional value yep that's all I have so it's open for some yeah out of my research I have done a lot of googling and I have even published a lot of references so from these links and references the books I've read etc I've realized that this is the ideal number and this is one you know blog which I have seen and which I felt interesting about the team size so it's not that 4 is the ideal number or 5 is the ideal number it's depending on the context it context really matters but if you go more than 7 or 8 it's very difficult to manage I think probably some of audience also can talk about it if you have some experience okay yes exactly even when in scrum alliance says that 7 plus or minus 2 right when the scrum team size they talk about that 7 plus or minus 2 so it depends on that even I used to you know give some exercises where we do some paper folding and different things so there you will see an ideal number again you know it may be 7 8 depends on the situation so context really matters it's it's only about the idea is that you don't be the notion of us have adding more people and getting more work done is not really true so you should really think about this phenomena before adding more people and try to get something done more faster that line is approaching I only one month I have work left for 20 man days and I have only five people with me and add 15 more people will not solve the problem that is something which we should really understand yeah yes this one okay so we see you can look at in a little different way like say can ban for example when we do can ban we never we don't have a habit of splitting it into small small tasks rather you keep a big story and maybe one or two people working on it but the idea is that with the moment they start putting in that end of the column make them responsible let them write their name let it be visible so people will get a tend to get a tendency that yeah my item is not moving it's hanging around there for quite some time so they'll feel you know kind of accountability and responsibility within themselves but if you can so if you look back about our scrum way of doing things we split it because we want to have parallelism we want the highest priority item to be moving to the other side as fast as possible the value chain right so the the more the more value if I get the highest priority item you may as far as possible that is what I am looking at so and nobody is forcing the team member to pick up the particular task so he's free to choose the item he actually wanted to choose anything else thank you