One of the implications of the COVID-19 virus has been that most in-person meetings are getting moved online or canceled as we continue to shelter in place and work from home. As a project manager, I schedule my share of the 11 million meetings that take place every day in the U.S. – all of which are now online thanks to COVID-19. One of the factors I consider when setting a Microsoft (MSFT) Teams or Zoom online meeting is pizza.
That may sound goofy. Pizza can help the PM decided how to shape a meeting. The PMI PMBOK does not venture any suggestions on how many is too many participants for a meeting. My experience says that too many participants over-complicate a meeting and make a video call unwieldy and not enough of the right people prevents decisions from sticking. PMs are looking for a meeting that is just right.
The Bezos rule
One way to get the right number of project meeting members comes from Jeff Bezos. While not a PM – you really can’t argue with his cred’s – richest man in the world – Amazon (AMZN) – second billionaire in space. TargetTech says that Mr. Bezos uses the 2 pizza rule to decide how many attendees should be invited to a meeting.
While, sadly, the 2 pizza rule does not mandate that pizza be present at meetings, it means that every meeting should be small enough that attendees could be fed with two large pizzas. Mr. Bezos is known to have used ‘two pizza’ meetings and small project teams to foster a decentralized, creative working environment when Amazon was a startup.
The article explains that Mr. Bezos’ decision to keep meetings small in order to encourage productivity is backed up by science. The late Harvard researcher J. Richard Hackman devoted nearly 50 years studying team performance and concluded that four to six is the optimal number of members for a project team and no work team should have more than 10 members.
2 pizza rule advantages
According to Professor Hackman, this is because communication problems increase “exponentially as team size increases.” Ironically, the larger the team, the more time will be spent on communication instead of producing work.
The author points out that the 2 pizza rule has several other advantages.
- It helps prevent groupthink. Groupthink is a phenomenon that occurs when a large group’s need for consensus overrides the judgment of individual group members.
- It discourages HiPPO, an acronym that stands for the “highest-paid person’s opinion.” HiPPO describes the tendency for lower-paid employees to defer to higher-paid employees when a decision has to be made.
- It cuts down on social loafing. Social loafing occurs where more people on a team means less social pressure, which could lead to less engagement.
rb-
The optimal number of team members is 5. You can feed them with 2 large pizzas and if there is a vote, it will not end up in a tie.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.