How to create a great Scrum Team?

One of the main success factors in the Agile journey of an enterprise is to create cross functional and self-organized team. Question in people’s mind is how we create a great scrum team.

Every team goes through the phases as described by Tuckman-Model — Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing.

While setting up a new Scrum team we should expect teams to fail in the initial stages of Agile Adoption similar to a child when it starts to walk falls down many times before walking confidently.

The size of the scrum team matters a lot. Have a smaller team of 7 +/- 2 people. Smaller teams have greater collaboration. We can avoid communication overhead if the teams are smaller in size and co-located. In order to achieve best possible performance it would be optimal to have a balanced set of skills. Only then the Scrum Team will be able to deal with the ever-changing challenges.

Ideal members of the Scrum Team are independent, self-motivated, customer-focused, responsible, and collaborative. The team should be able to foster an environment of independent thinking and group decision-making in order to extract the most benefits from the structure.

A great Scrum Team consists of a Product Owner who maximizes value, a Scrum Master who enables continuous improvement and a Development Team who focus on delivering high quality product increments.

A great product owner represents the voice of the customer and works collaboratively with the business stakeholders to create a business vision. Product Owner works with the development team to translate the business vision into a Product that customer wants. Delighting customer is the main goal of any Product Owner.

The success of Scrum team greatly depends on the Scrum Master who acts as a facilitator and encourages the team to make their decisions and guards the team from unwanted interruptions from others so that the team can focus on their work. Scrum Master plays an essential role in the team forming process.

To build team cohesion, the Scrum Master should ensure that relationships among the team members are positive and that the team members are unified in achieving the overall project and organizational goals, thus leading to greater efficiency and increased productivity.

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