Why smaller teams outperform bigger ones

We started last week's blog post with a well-known phrase, so here are two more: "many hands make light work" and "too many cooks spoil the broth". So which is right? Or are they both true, to some extent? Large-scale IT projects are a useful barometer for assessing whether many hands or fewer cooks are preferable when it comes to software development.

Consider the NHS IT restructuring plans, a calamitous failure by any measurement, thanks partly to the huge numbers of people and teams working towards the same goal — by the time the patient record system was scrapped, it was estimated to have cost taxpayers around £10 billion. Compare that with the government's digital service, a model of efficiency and streamlined functionality in comparison.

Could it be that the GDS succeeded because it used smaller teams working on separate goals?

Most software building projects are a collaborative effort: outside of the machine code at the core of it all, real-life human beings need to communicate and work together. The bigger a team becomes, the more interconnections are created, which means more potential for miscommunication and mistakes. This network effect is compounded as additional people get involved.

That's not to say a small team can cope with projects of any size — a group of five programmers would struggle to revamp the NHS patient records system — but breaking up a project to fit a series of smaller teams is far better than growing a single team to meet increasing demands. Imagine a Rubik's Cube four times the normal size: would you let four people try and solve it simultaneously? Or would you split it into four sections and let one person take a chunk each?

Which brings us back to the Government Digital Service — sections such as car tax and voter registration were tackled one by one, keeping goals and teams as small as possible. 350 websites were transitioned over to the new system in two years, reshaping government technology and the online interface for public users. Thanks to those efforts we are now one of the world leaders in digital government.

That's why we believe smaller teams are one of the keys to success in software development, and why we'd recommend the same approach to any business in the digital industry. Big results are still possible, but you'll get there a lot faster.