I made the decision to work in small, preferably very small, teams 20 years ago. Why? Because I noticed that the very small teams I worked with were far, far mo

I made the decision to work in small, preferably very small, teams 20 years ago. Why? Because I noticed that the very small teams I worked with were far, far more productive than the bigger teams. I also learned at that time, empirically, that "flying in" domain experts for certain problems was far, far more effective than having them hang around on the project. And this is how I've liked to work with my clients ever since. Taking this a stage further, I decided to study individual effectiveness on teams by writing a thesis on it (for my Masters) by studying a small number of projects in quite a large company. (I am very grateful to that company, and a particular individual, whom I still know, for letting me run riot in their IT department for a summer to conduct this study.) The result I obtained was absolutely clear that productivity is linked to individuals. I used function points as the basis for the study, and while I'm not wedded to them in any way, I've yet to find a better metric. I'm not active in that field any longer, so please enlighten me of progress. The maxim "hire smart people and get out of their way" is the best way to be productive in IT. Better still, practice servant leadership alongside http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership and you are golden. It's hellishly difficult getting businesses to adopt this practice, though. When you are all command and control this doesn't tickle your pseudo alpha genes. But when you want to get work done, it's the nuts.