Limit Team Mental Workload

Description

Ensure that all teams are working with a Mental Workload that they can cope with on a sustained basis. Each team will have a practical limit to the breadth and depth of solution and business domain complexity that they can deal with and maintain a sustained high quality outcome.

Factors to balance when considering the practical mental workload limit for a team:

• Inherent business domain complexity
• Level of Product Owner support
• Number of inter-team collaborative relations and their intensity
• Solution domain skills diversity spectrum required
• Solution platform complexity and ease of use
• Solution architecture complexity
• Team maturity - team cohesion and agility
• Level of Scrum Master support

Rationale

At scale, there is a higher probability that the potential mental workload will exceed a single team's capacity. Team design must therefore balance a practical distribution of mental workload across teams whilst maximising other team design principles.

This results in:

• A high learning curve on much of the team's work leading to extended delivery times and less than optimal quality design decisions
• High stress reducing teams' creativity and motivation levels

Related Principles

• Favour Teams with broader Solution Accountability
• Favour Teams with broader Business Domain Competence
• Maximise Team autonomy
• Minimum Viable Product Owners
• Favour teams with maximised cognitive diversity