Journey of an Agile Team
Agile Transformation: Journey of an Agile Team.
Organizations that needs to form an Agile team, needs to consider the foundation of an Agile Team starts with Team work and Team formation model. Especially, when the team has short-term and long-term goals.
In this article, I would like to emphasize that an "Agile Team" with good foundation of Teamwork, is more likely to bring the required benefits (for the Agile Transformation).
For this team work topic, I would like to provide 2 important pillars
1) Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
2) Team formation by Bruce Tuckman
As an Enterprise / Program-Portfolio / Team Level / Leadership Coach one can utilize and emphasize these two fundamental pillars to achieve good success in guiding the organisation's transformation, especially when working with Teams.
And my preference and recommendation is the following approach, shown in the diagram for achieving continuous improvement and also increase the focus on the maturity & mindset is (taking the right approach)
A group of individuals, needs to adopt agile practices would have more difficulties than a good team adopting agile practices, because of their internal team's decision making capability.
But from traditional perspective, it is easy to move from a group mode to process based group, by adopting an agile practice immediately and show some results by optimizing with shallow Lean-Agile adoption, and this type of process groups (without team work) leads to more ineffective and inefficient progress in the transformation (along with existing problems, there are difficult to solve). The process based groups are results of incomplete or partial transformation, compared to a complete transformation.
This is where you need a good System Thinker (a Leader / Senior Manager or Enterprise Coach) who can implement the foundations, pillars before building big transformation plans on top of these foundations and pillars.
The (well-formed) teams that promote teamwork, and adopt agile practices are Agile Teams. Agile Teams focus on Transparency, Inspect & Adapt approach on every day basis, and their Mindset and Maturity in Agile practices can be seen by promoting Agile values & principles...
- The Agile Team's can make their local decisions themselves, and work with business and stakeholders in informing and updating about their decisions - early & often.
- They work closely with business (e.g. Product Owner, Customers) on prioritization of the requirements based on the business needs and change as per the need.
3. These Agile teams, simply focus on removing impediments and moving quickly towards achieving their goals, and they collaborate closely with Operations, Production teams. They utilize Kanban, Scrum, XP and combination of Agile Practices that are required to achieve Business Agility (ability to deliver value quickly and also provide platform for accepting changing requirements). They visualize end-to-end flow with value-stream map.
4. Continuous improvement through proper and simple retrospectives, closing the action items on-time are very important goals for these teams. They don't need to play any additional games in their training or retrospective, because their collaboration itself is good and have positive energy in the organisation. They also good influence for the organisation culture and provide collaborate learning approach and sharing of knowledge for everyone.
Please provide your feedback & suggestions.