Managing performance and quality with smaller team

Managing quality is crucial for launching a product

Quality products help to maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty and reduce the risk and cost of replacing faulty goods.Customers expect to deliver quality products. If you do not, they will quickly look for alternatives. Quality is critical to satisfying customers and retaining their loyalty so they continue to buy from you in the future.Quality also influences company’s reputation. Today’s market is very competitive, poor quality or product failure can let you down in the market affecting  long term revenues.

Quality assurance with small teams size

Bigger is better only if its a company not a project team. Smaller teams are more efficient than larger teams, not just a little more efficient, but dramatically more efficient.It’s just natural to believe that larger teams means you’ll get more awesome stuff done, and so much more swiftly,which is why I was taken a back when I learned that throwing more people at a problem is one of the most common productivity traps that you can fall into.People in smaller teams are far more personally productive and functional as compared to larger teams.

Below are some traps that conspire to inflate the size of the project team :

1. Clarity – Organizations are good at launching a project, but not at clearly thinking through what the project is trying to achieve from a business perspective and why. This fuzziness in business requirements creates confusion, which in turn leads to over-design, accompanied with higher estimates for money, resources and time to account for the additional risk.
2. Communication and coordination – Communication and coordination overhead rises dramatically with team size. In the worst possible case where everyone on the project needs to communicate and coordinate with everyone else, the cost of this effort rises as the square of the number of people in the team. That’s such a powerful effect, in fact, that a large team couldn’t possibly hope to achieve the goal of everyone coordinating their effort. But a small team could.
3. Motivation – It’s a fact that smaller teams stay more motivated. Larger teams tend to fall prey to the phenomenon of social loafing: the bigger the team size, the less individual effort. Working in smaller team means that good work is likely to get noticed. And given that you will have a more varied workload, you will have ample opportunity to prove your worth and have your potential realised.
4. Cost – Large team need more resources and more salaried.Smaller teams cost less . A small team that is not over-taxed will provide greater efficiency and productivity. Ultimately, a small team works faster than a larger team, runs more efficiently, and has less overhead.

How to manage with small team and assure quality in less time period.

You can use software development methodology, like e.g. Scrum? Scrum is one nice Agile way of working.This is a good way to make our teams efficient, but it is also a good way of introducing rules to the way we develop software.

Small team of productive developers can develop a lot of functionality in one iteration. Suppose you have five developers and less resources to hire a full time QA manager. Apply a process where you rotate the QA role between the developers.Each developer will be responsible for QA one week at a time. In Scrum Task Board is used to keep track of the current sprint, and these boards often have a column for tasks awaiting approval by QA. What you need to do is that when a task is done we move it to “Ready for verification”. And then another developer on the team does the QA job. He will:

Conclusion

We would conclude that it’s easy to manage with small team size and also have good performance in all area. Next time when you are planning a project think hard about the optimum staffing levels because it can clearly have a significant impact on the overall results.