Power of Small Teams - Value & Significance

Before i start my blog , i must mention the title of my next blog : Importance of writing your thoughts - Way to success. Hope the title excites you & let you stay connected.

I always start my writings by working on fundamental definition of subject, as the subject says " Power of Small Teams to do miracle" we have the actor as Team . As wiki says :

A team comprises a group of people or animals linked in a common purpose. Teams are especially appropriate for conducting tasks that are high in complexity and have many interdependent subtasks.

A group in itself does not necessarily constitute a team. Teams normally have members with complementary skills and generate synergy through a coordinated effort which allows each member to maximize his or her strengths and minimize his or her weaknesses.

Types of teams

1 Independent and interdependent teams
2 Self-managed teams
3 Project teams
4 Sports teams
5 Virtual teams
6 Interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary teams
7 Not all groups are teams


Coming to power of small teams , let me ask you what is favorite sports.......think over it as it resembles your thought process. I like playing chess & thereby my strategy building activity can be seen in my work. Whe it comes to building a team we need a leader or a mentor who can positively infuse the energy required to drive the team to the required objective. Now see how clearly things start coming in front of us as we are now focused on setting up objective for team.

# Objective is the achievement of a final set of actions within a given operation

So we have people --> driven by a leader --> forms a team --> to achieve a objective --> In a defined operation. Here operation refers to the journey that we all travelling in.....surely lead by our visions.

The power of small teams to do miracles

The more members you add to a team the harder communication becomes. To that end, it's sometimes hard for me to understand why startups are so focused on growing their teams out during the early stages.

Bezos likes to refer to the ideal team size as "two-pizza teams:" any team that is small enough that they can be fed by a couple of pizza pies, is a model of efficiency and accomplishment. Anything larger is not.


When there is one person both running and operating the entire show, you have 0% communication efficiency loss. The vision is designed and implemented exactly as it was originally conceived. Add a second teammate and you automatically introduce inefficiency into the equation. With each new person added to a team, the potential for communication efficiency loss gets worse as each person creates failure points with every other person. Once you start getting beyond 8 team members, the efficiency loss becomes so great that it can only be made up by throwing additional resources at the problem. In other words, you are not going to see double the output from a team of 15 people as you will with a team of 8 (even though you'd expect it on paper). In fact, you'd be lucky to see even a 25% increase in output, even though your team size has doubled.

Keeping your team small

So what's the overarching lesson? You don't need a huge team to successfully launch a start up. In fact, your chances of succeeding are better, the smaller your team size. You cut out as many communication points of failure as possible and keep your startup costs down.

So how do you keep your team small?

* Choose a project that is simple to implement. Don't try to create a complex suite of applications. (Yeah, I'm a hypocrite). 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?



* Document everything. It's obvious that you will need a business plan. What's not so obvious is that you should also document the seemingly mundane; methods used for team communication, methods used for integrating with potential partners, methods used for keeping a company blog up-to-date and interesting. 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.

without an example nothing is complete ....we have a successful case study of www.ecademy.com which is a leading social & business networking portal & drives its revenues from subscriptions of over few million dollars a year with a team size of 5 people on board.

Note: Never forget the power social community which comes for no cost but is valuable for positioning your brand in an appropriate way.

More stories & blogs on the way to 2010.

Year of actions & clarity.



Thanks & Regards
Yogesh Huja
+91-9810560650
MD, Swaran Soft
www.swaransoft.com
yogesh@swaransoft.com

Twitter : http://twitter.com/yogeshhuja
Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/yogesh.huja