MIT Sloan Management Review

Leadership and Organizational Studies, Operations Management and Research

 

How Microsoft Makes Large Teams Work Like Small Teams

By Michael A. Cusumano

October 15, 1997

Microsoft’s approach to software product development allows teams to be creative and retain the autonomy of small groups by frequently synchronizing and stabilizing continuous design changes.

Buy article & permissions

Common sense, industry experience, and some academic research all suggest that, when conducting any complex tasks, small teams of talented people are better than large teams of average or talented people. To develop new products quickly, for example, a recent textbook argues that small teams of no more than ten or so people are most effective.1 One reason may be that the fewer people on a team, the easier it is to have good communication and consistency of ideas among team members. Small teams also can simplify scheduling and work out interdependency difficulties.2

Another factor to consider in determining the optimal size for a particular team is individual team-member productivity. In software development, for example, talented programmers are known to be ten times or more as productive as the least talented members of a team.3 This is no doubt true for other types of research, engineering, and intellectual work, such as creative writing, that we cannot so easily routinize or mechanize. Getting the same amount of raw productivity from a team of ten talented people as opposed to 100 untalented people provides other benefits as well, such as simplifying communication and scheduling problems. The ten-person team would probably produce better results faster, even though managing prima donnas, such as “super-programmers,” can present other challenges (the... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

In This Issue

 

Best Sellers