Forming a Great Agile Team - Doing Agile to Being Agile

There have been many articles on "how to make great Agile Team". Even if you go to a matured Agile Teams you may be able to hear/see the following dysfunctions/Anti-patterns

• We are Agile as we are doing stand up daily
• We do stand up over phone
• We have most of the team members working from home
• Scrum Master assigns work to the team members and chases after them
• Scrum Master takes status on everyday stand up call and also resolves the issue there
• Team will do requirement, design, development, testing sequentially in a Sprint
• Product Owners are not present for showcase or Demo...they need a dedicated Sprint for UAT
• PM/SM scolds team members in Retrospective for not doing correct work during the Sprint
• and many more

Out of several important things we have come up with the following simple things to become successful in Agile World

1. Team Formation - Very important for any Agile Success as the team drives the culture, the values, practices and principles

• Preferably Co-located Team (for distributed team - recommendation to have a E2E Delivery team at one location - reduce dependencies and hand offs)
• Cross Functional team
• Self Directed/Motivated Team
• Empowered to take decision
• E2E Responsibilities

2. Work Distribution - Effective work/value distribution is essential to ensure team is delivering "Outcome" and not "Output"

• Effective Demand Management - Prioritizing and Filtering Ideas/Opportunities
• Effective Discovery Management - Ensuring "Doing the Right Work"
• Scheduling the Work as per Capacity
• "Pull" over "Push"

3. Measuring the Success - Agile Measurements and Metrics are much different than any traditional - we try to go away from measuring too many things. Also it is more important to measure the trend than running after meeting "Numbers"

• Measure Trends
• Don't go after numbers/goals
• Don't compare
• Agile always talks about getting better - so no best practices rather borrow the brilliance from others
• Primary Measures - Throughput, Cycle Time, Quality, Team and Customer Satisfaction

Doing Agile vs Being Agile

Agile has set of Practices and principles but most important thing is to imbibe the Agile Values - Trust, Openness, Courage, Respect and Empathy. A team can very well follow "just" some principles and practices but if you just go ahead and ask the team the following questions you will be amazed and you will find they are just "following" certain practices as they have been told to do so...however the "belief" on those practices and Principles are not yet there - That is "SHU" step achieved.

• Do you know why are you doing this ceremony?
• Why do we need to Iteration Planning, Retrospective, Showcase, Stand Up etc?
• Why do we need to keep iteration length small 2-3 weeks?
• What is the purpose of breaking Stories?

In most of the cases team knows "What" and "How" but most of them don't know "why" are they doing it...

Once team understands the value of doing the "Practices" and "Principles", starts believing on those, Living Agile and Breathing Agile all the team, they themselves organize, take decisions, coordinate with PO, manage Risk - they are in "HA" stage

Finally the "RI" stage....the team is now empowered ...they are ready to take challenge...they are ready to challenge Leaders...they are enabled to innovate...they are ready to adapt to adverse situations....examples - changing Sprint length from 2 weeks to 1 week...adopting Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment .....DevOps ...Involving Automation...moving from Scrum to KANBAN to give value ahead of time....Team reached "RI" Stage

Happy Reading !!

Contact

Subhabrata Pal, Agile Coach

+91-9830619877, [email protected]