What is an Agile Team?

To understand agile teams, let’s first understand what the opposite of agile teams is.

This is siloed teams.

We could have a team of engineers, a team of business analysts, a team of project managers, a team of quality analysts, a team of operations managers, and so on.

This structure is reasonable as businesses evolved over the years and companies grew in numbers.

The person at the top of this structure is an expert, who mentors and guides their team towards success.

This structure restricts value creation as none of these silos are able to deliver value to the business single handedly.

For example, this team of project managers need to collaborate with multiple different stakeholders across the organization to deliver value.

What is wrong with collaborating with siloed teams?

You could end up with a lot of blaming, due to lack of collaboration.

When the Sales team runs into challenges, they might blame the Mechanical Engineers.

The Mechanical Engineers might blame the Electrical Engineers and so on.

This is the fundamental fault of the organizational structure.

This is where the agile team comes in.

An agile team is a team that has the ability to deal with changes in the environment that has the ability to deliver value to the business on a consistent, predictable basis.

So what is the structure of an agile team?

1)     An agile team should be cross-functional.

This means that it should have people from different parts of the business working together as one team that can has a value stream.

They should be able to go from the project triggers to collecting money from the customer or generating value for the business single-handedly.

So for example, if there is a team that's working on developing a software application, they should have the ability to define, build, test, and possibly deploy value in the form of the software application for the business.

Can a team of project managers single-handedly define, build, test, and deploy a software application?

Probably not, so that's not a value stream.

2)     An agile team should be self-organizing.

They should plan their own work.

Why is that important?

Because that improves ownership.

When they are not told what to do, and they can decide what to do, the psychological ownership of the work shifts to them.

This increases engagement, and therefore performance.

3)     An agile team should be small.

Large teams are difficult to manage, engage, and lead.

What is the right size of an agile team?

It can be anywhere from five to eleven people.

This is a sweet spot that brings people together, creates excitement, and gets things moving.

A cross-functional, self-organizing, small (five to eleven people) team, that can go from trigger, all the way to delivering value and collecting money from the customer single handedly.

This increases ownership, increases engagement, removes blaming, removes finger-pointing and creates consistent sustainable value for the business.

This is what an agile team is.