Growing the Team: Learning from Previous Problems

The referential implementation finished on time (it took three months). This was a big success because, for the first time, the team actually delivered. The result after these three months was bigger than after the two years of the first try. Of course, this great success was celebrated with a big party.

To reflect on the achievements of the first three months, the starting team went off-site for a closed meeting. During this reflection, this team decided it would need another three months to clean up the architecture. However, the members of the project team who were not part of the starting team were waiting to start. For financial reasons (having 100 people sitting unproductively around costs a lot) the project manager was forced to immediately start expanding the team, and take the rest on board. Although the expansion of the team was mainly financially motivated, this decision was also very important for the motivation of the rest of the team. Everybody wanted to be part of this successful team and, moreover, everybody wanted to forget their experiences on the failed project, which was the only project experience for most of the team members.

Scaling the process

Now that this project had started so successfully, the project manager did not want to risk anything and therefore took great care to create and establish a development process that served the needs of the team. From the starting team, we had the experience of a development process, which we knew worked for a small team. So we carefully started scaling this process while growing the team.