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I've heard this often (a team is greater than the sum of its parts) but never bought into it. Can you justify why it is true? I hold that a team is always stri

I've heard this often (a team is greater than the sum of its parts) but never bought into it. Can you justify why it is true? I hold that a team is always strictly less than the sum of its parts. Productivity is lost in communication between team members.

yuliyp 15y ago
Developing software isn't just a linear stream of ideas to lines of code. If a 5 minute discussion with another team member leads to a design that will save a week of refactoring later on, then the team with those 2 people is now MORE than those two people would have done if you cut off all communication between them. Or in other cases, another set of eye balls will find a bug in 1 minute instead of half a day. Heterogeneity, even among very skilled software engineers, exists. Thus you want people whose skills and weaknesses blend, so that the weaknesses of team members can get helped out by others on the team, and thus increase productivity.
Silhouette 15y ago
> Productivity is lost in communication between team members. Agreed. > I hold that a team is always strictly less than the sum of its parts. But this does not follow. For example, suppose you are trying to build something that requires solving two hard problems. Moreover, suppose that no individual in the world has the skill and insight to solve both problems, but that for each problem, there is one person in the world who can solve it. In this situation, a team consisting of either person alone plus anyone else you like could never succeed in building what you set out to build. If you like, its total value is still zero. However, a team consisting of both key people can finish the build, and thus has a total value greater than zero. Communications overhead within a team is usually a multiplicative effect, which means if the positive contribution is only a summation effect then your reasoning works. However, often the positive side of a team's productivity is also a multiplicative effect as well. In that case, you can improve a team's performance by introducing even a single significantly above average contributor, but you can also improve the team's performance quantitatively by improving a below-average contributor's performance and improve it qualitatively by introducing an extra contribution where something important was missing entirely.

yuliyp 15y ago

Developing software isn't just a linear stream of ideas to lines of code. If a 5 minute discussion with another team member leads to a design that will save a week of refactoring later on, then the team with those 2 people is now MORE than those two people would have done if you cut off all communication between them. Or in other cases, another set of eye balls will find a bug in 1 minute instead of half a day. Heterogeneity, even among very skilled software engineers, exists. Thus you want people whose skills and weaknesses blend, so that the weaknesses of team members can get helped out by others on the team, and thus increase productivity.

Silhouette 15y ago

> Productivity is lost in communication between team members. Agreed. > I hold that a team is always strictly less than the sum of its parts. But this does not follow. For example, suppose you are trying to build something that requires solving two hard problems. Moreover, suppose that no individual in the world has the skill and insight to solve both problems, but that for each problem, there is one person in the world who can solve it. In this situation, a team consisting of either person alone plus anyone else you like could never succeed in building what you set out to build. If you like, its total value is still zero. However, a team consisting of both key people can finish the build, and thus has a total value greater than zero. Communications overhead within a team is usually a multiplicative effect, which means if the positive contribution is only a summation effect then your reasoning works. However, often the positive side of a team's productivity is also a multiplicative effect as well. In that case, you can improve a team's performance by introducing even a single significantly above average contributor, but you can also improve the team's performance quantitatively by improving a below-average contributor's performance and improve it qualitatively by introducing an extra contribution where something important was missing entirely.