Limiting connections
Often, not all elements in a system are connected. The easiest way to reduce system complexity is to reduce the opportunity for elements to communicate or interoperate with one another. Another way is to reduce the number of elements that participate in a system.
If you have studied Scrum or Lean-Agile scaling strategies, you probably noted that they all leverage small team concepts. They do this even on very large product development activities, sometimes involving hundreds or thousands of people. Breaking up work across multiple small teams is one way to limit the number of interactions between the people working on the product.
For example, Scrum of Scrums limits cross-team interactions to a handful of team members, called Ambassadors. The Nexus approach to Scrum implements Network Integration Teams (NITs) to manage cross-team dependencies, coordination, and synchronization activities. Similarly, the Scaled-Agile Framework® (SAFe®) implements...