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You probably already know the four necessary
ingredients of Agile teams. They are cross-functional,
self-organizing, focused on delivering value to their
customer, and abiding by the Agile principles.
If you form an Agile team by these characteristics
alone, you're off to a good start. You can increase
their chances of success with these four tips:
Get at least five people. The team will be able to
accomplish more, which makes the work richer and more
rewarding. They will have access to more innovation
and critical thinking.
Represent all necessary functions. The gold in
Agile is in getting to done: moving from idea to
shippable product. If in your case that's really only
programmers and testers, fine. But for many teams
that's just a narrow portion of product development.
By including more functions from the idea-to-product
stream, such as architects, DB, and release
engineering, you'll bring more of development under
the Agile umbrella. That will reduce dependencies,
coordination, and management overhead.
Have an empowered, knowledgeable, available product
owner. If your product owner can't make hard
decisions, doesn't know enough, or isn't available
enough, someone else will have to make up the
shortfall. The results are rarely satisfactory.
Get someone to coordinate and run interference.
Whether that's your formal Agile project manager /
ScrumMaster or just someone stepping up, the role is
critical. It will help the team stay focused on their
mission.
The next five tips are particularly useful if your
organization hasn't quite developed “the Agile
muscle” yet and you're forming one of your first
Agile teams. These tips will increase your team's
chances of buying into Agile, leveraging it
successfully, and having the methods stick.
Ask for volunteers. Unless your organization has
rallied around Agile adoption and everyone's fired
up, chances are some on your staff won't like it. If
you're running a pilot project, don't just assign
people; check with them first. Having some team
members with positive Agile experience is a great
plus.
Educate them sufficiently on Agility. Seriously,
this matter of having one person take the CSM course
and be expected to teach others has got to stop.
Spend four figures on a non-certification, in-house
course for your entire team (e.g. “our Pragmatic
Scrum”) and you'll
save so many hours lost to anxiety, confusion and
misunderstanding.
Locate the team in one place. Being co-located
isn't critical for successful use of Agile, but it's
often necessary for great performance. Co-location
increases communication and feedback, reduces errors
and dead-end evolutionary paths, and supports team
building.
Some people need to pay attention to process. Let's
face it, most people don't notice process or care
about it. Your retrospectives, and overall process
improvements, will be so much stronger if you have at
least two team members notice process matters (e.g.
“We haven't been getting to done as much as we used
to.”)
Have the entire team start together. You should
properly kick off the process, project, and team. But
even if you don't, have the entire team present on
day 1. They can't build teamwork effectively if
members are being dripped in.
Copyright © 2011, 3P Vantage, Inc. All rights reserved.
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