The entire reason teams exist as a concept is to improve management and coordination logistics. A standup is a daily meeting that every team member has to attend, and in order for it to be productive it shouldn't just be robotic status updates; each member should actually be ingesting and thinking about everything that's brought up. Making sure it can be run smoothly should actually be considered an important factor, and if it's not it does call into question the objectives of the team lead or project manager. Of course, there are other factors as well, as you suggested, and there are indeed cases where a standup of 15+ people can make sense. Even in those cases, though, it is a result of pure incompetence to let the standup run for 45+ minutes even a single time outside of perhaps a major disaster.
As a supporting datapoint, in the entire company I work at, there isn't a single standup with that many people.
Hmm, my first thought for running a 15 person project isn't to run it as three different five person teams.
A couple of questions
Was the company you work at a software product company? Are your teams cross functional? Do people exist across multiple teams?
My fundamental issue with splitting a 15 person team into three 5 person teams it seems more difficult to satisfy two other attributes I think are valuable in teams. That they are cross functional and flat.
If it truly is a 15 person project for its entire duration then it's not worth splitting up, but you could still consider whether the whole team needs to be present for every standup. More often than not, though, when the team size reaches the 15+ range the project often can be broken down into smaller discrete deliverables that do not need 15 person teams to achieve.
Where I work it is all software. We can and sometimes do have folks on multiple teams but generally try to avoid that. And teams can definitely be cross-functional.
but you don't need to have standups with all the team. That seems to be the problem. Thats why i said "standup team" not "team" in my original comment.
how many of those 15 ppl care about what you are doing on a regular basis. I am guessing not more than 5. I've never been in a standup with more than 5-6 people, 15 ppl standup sounds too ridiculous to me.
