Today’s Work Demands Stable Teams

In software development, stable teams are higher performing and more productive. Research by Rally Software showed an almost 2:1 difference in throughput between software development teams that were 95% or more dedicated compared with teams that were 50% or less dedicated. The 2014 white paper “The Impact of Agile Quantified,”^[2] based on the analysis of the process and performance data of nearly 10,000 teams, indicated that stable agile teams result in up to 60% higher productivity.

One reason for greater productivity in stable teams is that they don’t have to repeatedly go through the team-building stages of forming, storming, norming, and performing over and over again. Constantly changing and churning teams (as you often get when assembling and disassembling specific project teams) may never get out of the initial forming stage, and they could forever stay a group of individuals, no matter how talented.

People working in small, stable teams are also happier. Certainly our own internal surveys showed that job satisfaction increased when we started working in fixed teams. Some of the responses highlighted that people felt more productive while working fewer hours and that being allocated 100% to one team reduced stress. We gained confidence from these comments coming at a time when our measurements demonstrated that overall productivity was also significantly increasing.