So we started our journey as a team of coaches with no background in Agile, and were being trained 'on the job' as we also went about imparting our knowledge to newly formed squads under our organization's Agile way of working. We started off as 2 batches of recruits, all hired internally from different departments, and put together with the design team (which drafted all the proposed structure for new squads) to form the Agile Centre of Expertise.
The first batch formed the pioneer team of Agile coaches, who were comprised of 6 members. The second batch of coaches, of which I was part of, comprised of another 6 individuals. The coaching team was being taught Agile coaching by an external consultant, who was of the opinion that the second batch should form a separate, new squad by themselves. Both teams were 'led' by a scrum master, with a 'chief scrum master' (something that was coined up by the consultant) overseeing the activities of both teams of coaches.
At that time, many of those from our second batch did not like this idea, as there was (whether or not it really did is another matter) a perceived sense of being 'junior' compared to the first batch of coaches. We felt that we did not need to be split up into 2 teams, and since everyone in the coaching team was considered 'new' to Agile, let alone Agile coaching, there was no one who qualified to be the 'Chief Scrum master', not knowing that the scrum master was supposed to be practicing servant leadership. The consultant guiding us, on the other hand, justified that in the Agile space, when there were additional members joining, a new team should be created. However as there were quite some voices of dissent relating to this issue, the coaches decided to remain as one team.
Fast forwarding the journey nine months down the road, I somehow got the idea of why a scrum team should be comprised of not more than 9 members as a rule of thumb. It really took us a lot of time when we were going through our ceremonies. When one person was asking a question about a user story during sprint planning, all the other 13 team mates had to wait their turn to clarify on any ambiguous acceptance criteria. It was extremely time consuming when we did our retrospectives, as there was certainly too many voices and different point of views coming from a team that was so big. Besides that, it was difficult to come to consensus as there were sometimes 3-4 different opinions on various issues, with all suggestions seemingly workable and there was no clear cut right or wrong on proposed solutions.
It is now 2020 and we have another 2 new coaches on board; I am actually proposing for our coaching team to run our scrum ceremonies based on cells which we have created. These cells were supposed to undertake activities to promote and sustain Agile values and mindset in the organization, for example, we had a training cell, a continuous improvement cell and a skill and development cell.
Whether or not my team mates decide to go along with my idea remains to be seen. What I now have gained is a personal experience on why teams running scrum as a framework should be kept to no more than 9 members, with 6-7 being the optimum team composition.
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