Imagine being an executive for one of the largest pizza chains in the world and being invited to a meeting titled “Why Two Pizzas Are Enough”. How would you react? Would you be concerned a few zeroes had been left off? I did a contract role as an agile coach for just such a major pizza chain a few years ago. When it was time to give the executive management team an overview of Agile and Scrum (the specific methodology the company was interested in implementing) I was advised to not call the meeting Agile or Scrum. After asking why I should avoid this I was told that the business was sick and tired of hearing about both Agile and Scrum and they wouldn’t come if they knew what it was about. I used the analogy of two pizza teams to grab their attention and boy did I grab their attention! Every Executive attended the meeting.
In last week’s article “Agile and UX Design: Can they work together?” I mentioned the concept of a two pizza team. In this article I give more definition behind this concept and how it applies to agile approaches.
The two Pizza team terminology was coined by Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon. You can read more about his concept and how it has become part of the culture at Amazon by reading the Fast Company article “Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos”.
What is the two pizza team analogy? In Scrum, and most Agile methodologies, the team is meant to be a small, cross-functional, empowered team of approximately 5 – 9 people, depending on the project size. Therefore when your team has to work through lunch or late into the evening, as you know you do when you work on a project, the company can feed the team with two pizzas. I.e. Two pizza teams.
There is more accountability in smaller teams and they tend to avoid the issue of social loafing. According to social psychology, social loafing is the phenomenon where individuals tend to put forth less effort when working in a group than when they are working individually or coactively. Small teams in which each member is accountable for specific tasks for the project will avoid this concern and hold each other accountable on a daily basis for the work being produced.
There is, on occasion, a concern raised with the small number of team members when a project may be extremely large and require more than the recommended 5 – 9 person team. In this event, review the project goals and determine a team structure in which multiple Scrum (or whichever agile methodology is being used) can be structured reporting into one Project Manager or Product Owner (whichever role title your project is using). In many projects a quick review of the goals or epics will show a natural delineation into individual teams. These teams should be able to communicate with each other, but limit the communication paths necessary between the teams. In other words, if team A is unable to complete their work because they must first coordinate with additional teams the project will stall. Minimizing communication overhead while still encouraging communication between teams is a key strategy to the success of multiple teams within the same project.
Try the two pizza team concept when your organization on a smaller scale first. Something as simple as a meeting in which a decision or consensus needs to be reached or if there is a larger problem which you are attempting to solve, break it into smaller chunks and assign a small team to each chunk to solve. See how quickly and effectively these small teams can work. Not only will your problem get resolved, your corporate lunch bill will go down.
