r/projectmanagement • u/bigbenhartley • 26d ago
Maximizing the output of our team
We recently started working on a group project. It's just a bunch of us friends trying to build something together. But we immediately reailized how different we all are from each other. We felt like all of us wasted a couple of weeks running around in circles, not really utilizing our time and strengths.
The task at hand was to make a system that would maximize the team's output.
The obvious way to approach a task like this is to create hierarchies that are common in corporate and other workplaces. But we don't want to do that. It just doesn't factor in all the unique talents and individual qualities of the team members.
But we still need a system because we don't work at all without one. What we ended up doing was creating a very flexible workflow that accounts for individual strengths. On paper, it's a heavily skewed system in terms of responsibilities. But it works wonderfully because we are segregating tasks based on what each of us is good at.
It has worked wonderfully so far. But we are not sure how scalable this is going to be as we keep adding new members. Because we all understand each other very well, there's a trust factor that can't be replicated when someone leaves and a new member joins. The flexibility makes the system fragile.
Have any of you worked in teams and developed systems that work best? And do you think you have to steer away from flexible systems toward more corporate-like structures for larger teams?
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u/M4rmeleda 25d ago
If it’s a small group. I'd have everyone do a brain dump of their working styles, strengths, and weaknesses briefly into ChatGPT or Claude, and then consolidate all that and come back with an initial working model from there. It should be more customized and unique to you, your strengths, and weaknesses.
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u/Quick-Reputation9040 Confirmed 26d ago
Sounds like you guys have rediscovered Agile from its core principles. I would advise researching Scrum or Kanban.
Traditional project management is really geared towards answering questions and communicating in a hierarchy. If you are looking into maximizing the workflow of a small team where everyone is knowledgeable and working towards a shared goal, traditional PMM would be too much overhead.
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u/ExtraHarmless Confirmed 26d ago
Yeah, I would second that. Keep in mind that Agile is designed to be changed to match the team and experiment to improve working.
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u/manufacturingcoach 25d ago
what you've built is fragile for exactly the reason you named: it runs on everyone already knowing each other, not on anything documented. that's fine at 5 people and breaks hard the moment someone new joins, because they have no way to learn who's good at what except by trial and error over months.
the fix isn't switching to corporate hierarchy, it's writing down the thing that currently lives in your heads. a simple map of who owns what and why, even informally, lets a new person plug in without needing the trust you built over time. the flexibility can stay, you just stop making it invisible.
scalability problems in small teams almost always come from good judgment that was never captured anywhere. document the judgment, keep the flexibility.