I am part of a small team that a few of the departments have taken to calling the dream team, and I want to describe it, because I think it is the most efficient thing I have ever been part of.
There are six of us. One architect. Three developers. One person on quality assurance. And one designer, which is me. That is the whole thing.
What we do is arrive in a department at the City of Edmonton and look at how the work actually flows, and then we digitize it end to end. Not partially. Not a form bolted onto a paper process, which leaves everybody with two jobs instead of one. All the way through.
Permits. Payments. Applications people used to have to carry across the city by hand. Pet licences. A hundred quiet transactions that had lived on paper since long before any of us arrived. If a thing could be automated we automated it, and if it could not, we at least made it digital, so a person could pay online and enter their own information and get what they came for without standing in a queue.
The reason it works is the size. Six people can hold the whole problem in their heads at once. Nobody is writing a specification for someone who will never read it. The architect hears the designer flinch and understands why. The developer sees the person on the other end of the form.
I have worked on large teams and I have worked alone, and this sits in a sweet spot I did not know existed. Small enough to be honest with each other, large enough to actually finish. I think I will be looking for that shape for a long time.