from Hacker News

My Background is in Product Management and I run a small web development team for a consumer goods/manufacturing company. I have an awesome tech lead who doesn’t want to be a people manager, so I fill in that role. It’s a bit of a weird organization, but it works for us. The development team we’ve spun up is small, self sufficient and dedicated. I’m really proud of what we’ve built here. They care about our customers and understand our product.

Our company recently launched SAP and like others before us, launch was challenging. The company followed SAP best practice by shoving all the project team members into a room and running a giant waterscrumfall project. I wasn’t on the team but have inherited an integration with our b2b/b2c sites, which were rebuilt during that project.

We’ve made some internal changes post SAP launch, and I’ve won some executive support to become more involved, bring some product management experience to the project, and help shape the team. In the past I ran product teams responsible for a custom ERP for a large, successful ecomm site and this setup is what I’d like to mirror, and it’s what I’ve mirrored on my own team.

I’ve been looking for examples of organizations that use agile teams to in a small context to run SAP, as well as trying to staff a developer and product manager position, and it has been tough.

So, my question- Can an SAP project be run as a small self organized team, or is the product truly so complex that you need dedicated BA’s, DBAs, Functional Specialists, etc etc? Does anyone have experience with this that would be able to share? What’s the smallest team size you can get away with, and did the benefits of a small team outweigh the benefits of specialists?