Building a team
What sets a team apart from a group, the effect of size on communication and Brooks's law, Belbin's nine roles, the skills matrix and the stages of a team's life according to Tuckman.
- 24 cards
- 5 topics
- Free
The outline, topic by topic
Each topic is weighted the way the exam weighs it.
- Concepts
- Questions
- Sort and link
- The numbers
- Understand
A few cards from the deck
Team: what is it?
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A small group of people with complementary skills who pursue a shared goal for which they hold themselves jointly accountable.
A group brings people together; a team is recognised by its shared goal and its joint accountability for the result. Five developers sitting side by side, each on their own project, are only a group.
A software project is a month behind. What does Brooks's law predict if three developers are added?
- The delay grows: newcomers must be trained and communication gets harder
- The delay is made up in proportion: three more people mechanically do more work
- The delay does not change: the newcomers' effort exactly offsets the time spent training them
- The delay shrinks as soon as the newcomers know the code, whatever the arrival date
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The delay grows: newcomers must be trained and communication gets harder
Veterans lose time training, and each newcomer creates new communication channels: three more people on top of 7 add 24 channels (45 instead of 21).
In a team of n people, the number of communication channels is ….
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In a team of n people, the number of communication channels is n(n − 1) ÷ 2.
Each channel links two people, hence the division by 2. With 5 people, 10 channels; with 10, 45; with 20, 190: channels grow like the square of headcount.
Team role: what is it?
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The way a person naturally contributes to collective work; Meredith Belbin describes nine: plant, resource investigator, coordinator, shaper, monitor evaluator, teamworker, implementer, completer finisher and specialist.
One person often holds two or three roles. The aim is not to find nine people but to leave no role without someone to hold it.