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