Small agile teams are the best.

When you combine agile with small projects, you get a dramatic improvement in project success rates. Small agile projects are nearly six times more likely to succeed than large waterfall projects and seven times less likely to fail.

Research by the Standish Group shows that small projects are ten times more likely to succeed than large projects and 1/2 as likely to fail, as shown below. In this research, a large project has 25 to 50 people working on it and a $6 to USD 10M budget. A small project has six or fewer people working on it and a budget of less than USD 1M.

The research also shows that agile projects are three times more successful than waterfall projects and 1/3 less likely to fail, as I discussed in Agile works.

When you combine agile with small projects, you get a dramatic improvement in project success rates. Small agile projects are nearly six times more likely to succeed than large waterfall projects and seven times less likely to fail, as shown below.

It's interesting to note that a small project is about the size of a typical Scrum team, usually around 6 or 7 people with a maximum of 10.

But what do you do if you need to build a large complex product that requires 25 to 50 people working on it? If you want to be successful, you will break that large project up into a set of 5 or 6 Scrum teams which each build an independent part of the product. These teams will collaborate by sharing the same Product Goal, Product Backlog, and Product Owner.

What do you think? Does this work for you? Have you been able to break large projects up into independent agile teams like this?