Size of SAP [was: Straw process outline for dealing with structuraland practices problems]

Brian E Carpenter brian at hursley.ibm.com
Fri Jul 18 11:09:22 CEST 2003


Certainly don't grow it. I actually believe that a group of 11 can
be cohesive and effective, although it's easier with 7 or 9.

Most important is that the 7, 9 or 11 individuals are truly committed
to participate and to reach agreement.

    Brian

Christopher Allen wrote:
> 
> Straw process outline for dealing with structural and practices problemsFrom:
> Elwyn Davies wrote:
> > There will be eleven members of the SAP as follows:
> 
> I've been involved in the meeting facilation consulting industry peripherally
> for over a decade, and there are some studies that say that this is not a very
> efficient number of people, unless you expect 3 or 4 no-shows regularly.
> 
> The optimum size for a committee has been show by numerous studies to be more
> ideally somewhere around 7. There are a variety of reasons hypothesized for
> this, but I've found it to be true from experience. One hypothesis is that this
> allows sufficient time for everyone to be able to have their input into the
> conversation without becoming distracted or bored waiting for others to finish.
> 
> My personal experience with groups of 9-15 is that someone always feels left
> out, that their opinion was not properly considered, or that the meeting is
> rigged against them by either personality, charisma, or process. Just a slightly
> bit fewer people and somehow this doesn't happen.
> 
> I've tried to solve this in the past by breaking up groups of 9-15 into smaller
> task meetings or sub-groups, but that doesn't really work very well either.
> 
> Oddly, when you grow the group to 25 or so there are iterative group processes
> that you can use that are different then what is used in a committee that work
> very well. The 'dead spot' is 10-20 -- small group processes don't work
> effectively and medium group processed don't work either. (Just FYI, the
> iterative group processes that work for 25+ people begin to fail at 70 people or
> so.)
> 
> My suggestion is that you either consider making the SAP group a tad smaller,
> say 8 or 9, or increase the size to 25 or so and use an iterative group process
> and a facilitator when they meet.
> 
> -- Christopher Allen
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> .. Christopher Allen                            Alacrity Management ..
> .. <ChristopherA at AlacrityManagement.com>   1563 Solano Ave. #353 ..
> .. o510/649-4030  f510/649-4034                  Berkeley, CA 94707 ..

-- 
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Brian E Carpenter 
Distinguished Engineer, Internet Standards & Technology, IBM 
On assignment at the IBM Zurich Laboratory, Switzerland


More information about the Problem-statement mailing list