How to Manage Geeks

The smaller the team, the faster the team members work. When you make the team smaller, you make the schedule shorter. That may sound counterintuitive, but it's been true for the past 20 years in this industry, and it will be true for another 20 years. The only method that I've found that works is to restrict the size of teams arbitrarily and painfully. Here's a simple rule of thumb for techie teams: No team should ever be larger than the largest conference room that's available for them to meet in.

At Novell, that means a limit of about 50 people. We separate extremely large projects into what we call "Virtual CDs." Think of each project as creating a CD-ROM of software that you can ship. It's an easy concept: Each team has to ship a CD of software in final form to someone else -- perhaps to another team, perhaps to an end user. When you treat each project as a CD, you enable one group to say to another, "Show me the schedule for your CD. When is this deliverable coming?" It's the kind of down-to-earth approach that everyone can understand, that techies can respect and respond to, and that makes almost any kind of project manageable.

Russ Mitchell rmitchell@usnews.com , a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report, writes about business and technology from Silicon Valley. You can visit Novell Inc. on the Web (www.novell.com).