Pods are the next step in an ongoing project management organization evolution. In recent decades, so-called scrum teams—cross-functional groups focused on deploying and iterating quickly—have replaced a slower, step-by-step project management methodology known as “waterfall,” which is noted in Chapter 3 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text.
Smaller than a traditional project management group, pods are designed to move faster to build. They are also more cross-functional, including engineers, designers and applied scientists. And critically, all that expertise is concentrated in just a handful of human workers (anywhere from 1 to 8), as well as AI agents.
For years project managers have been slowly favoring smaller and smaller teams in the name of speed and agility, but the growing capabilities of AI coding assistants and other agents that can potentially reduce time are allowing for even smaller pod-size structures. With AI agents doing more of the actual software development, including coding and testing, it takes fewer human workers to complete projects.
The benefit of pods is speed, agility and the ability to do more, faster, with fewer resources, said a Coinbase tech leader. That company now has a team of 3 people working on an AI adviser project, he said, adding that: “historically an undertaking like that would have required 10 to 15 people. There are these exponential gains when we have fewer people because you’re spending a lot less time in meetings and reviews and getting people on the same page.”
In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously advocated for the idea of the “two-pizza team”—that is, any team should be small enough that it could be fed with two pizzas. “If you have a large team, you spend half your time just talking to each other and trying to figure out what needs to be done,” said Amazon’s VP.
Classroom discussion questions:
- How is AI influencing the management of large projects?
- What is an AI agent?
The agile principles of project management (our topic in Chapter 3) are rapid iteration, cross-functional collaboration and customer-centric design. They have transformed and accelerated software development for several years. T
“There wasn’t anybody on that property who thought we were going to open on time,” said Dick Evans, one of the park’s managers on opening day. “And opening on time was critical to the company. We were at that point in debt up to our eyeballs. We’d borrowed close to $400 million to build phase one of Walt Disney World. And within a week of the time that he came on the property, the entire perspective changed. The energy level changed. He came in there like a tornado.”
Dr. Misty Blessley, Associate Professor of Statistics, Operations, and Data Science at Temple U., shares her sports preferences with us today.
The EA Madden game is going with an Eagles victory (Fortune, February 6, 2023), as are the legalized betting organizations. Still, we forge on with consulting event planning. I took a picture of a long line of portable toilets north of City Hall, which were in preparation for Pope Francis’ visit in 2015. It is to be food for thought about all that goes into planning a parade. “Kansas City officials are planning a multimillion-dollar parade for Feb. 15…,” (The Kansas City Star, February 2, 2023).
Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert in the planning of “megaprojects,” huge efforts that require at least $1 billion of investment: bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, telescopes, the Olympics. He’s spent decades studying the many ways megaprojects go wrong and the few ways to get them right. His new book 
