Building an Agile IT Team for a Scaleup in Pandemic

Are you aware of the challenges for the moment?

Agile is the ability to create and respond to change. It is a way of dealing with an uncertain and chaotic environment. Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that emphasizes the importance of flexibility and adaptability over rigid planning. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly.

The pandemic has forced the transition to virtual work for many organizations, making it necessary to explore its possible effects on self-organizing agile teams. Ideally, distributed agile teams should adopt robust methods and practices and scale them across their organizations. They must provide end-to-end governance and visibility at all stages of product development.

Agile — Scrum

Teaming up for a Startup or Scaleup has different challenges. In order to convince the right talents, you should prepare well for the interviews.

The questions are, how can we;

• Build challenging teams?
• Find the right talent without running up for the score?
• Keep the team together during a crisis?
• Develop competency, vertical(domain) expertise?
• Can we save time by outsourcing?

‘Great people make great teams, make great companies.’

Facing reality is tough but you need to analyze the conditions you are in before starting. You have to face your own facts like your average salary, benefits, technology stack and career opportunities.

Be aware of the challenges for the moment:

• Increasing average salary
• Higher salaries at big companies — No way to compete
• The demand for remote work
• Painless job change due to remote work
• Weakened organizational memory
• New teams, new culture
• Pandemic: Inability to work

The teams you will set up are expected to be in line with the company’s vision and goals. You may need to set up a new organizational structure to achieve the goal. After positioning the inhouse talents, you can start working for the positions that remain open. You should also consider outsourcing some work if necessary, this will save both time and let you transfer the domain know-how.

Build Up :

• Ensure the company strategy and required expertise
• Create the new organization chart
• Find the gaps and the critical roles
• Use outsource option if team needs a quick domain expertise

Create the Hiring Strategy:

• Focus on timing and sectors you can get candidates
• Prioritize from senior to junior if possible
• Write the Story for Hiring
• Determine the technology stack that fits
• Set up a clear task management
• Set the goals and align with KPIs
• Motivate with the vision
• Form up the change team and get advocates
• Determine the collaborative toolkit to keep teams engaged
• Prepare an orientation presentation for newcomers
• Create an onboarding plan and execute

In interviews, we need to convince the people we want to hire. The genius candidate wants to hear our story. If they think it fits with their story or if they are impressed and want to travel with you, they will accept the offer. At this moment, you will need to have a story to tell.

The Story for Hiring can be made up of the following:

• Company and IT Vision
• Your tech stack
• The organization and the roles
• Your talents
• The methodology of development e.g. Agile
• Your products or services
• The engineering problem you try to solve
• Your customers

The Agile Manifesto is based on four pillars and 12 key principles. I prefer to focus on collaboration, adaptation to change and customer centricity. These three are usually most difficult for the teams. Working with a good Agile Coach allows us to overcome these difficulties more easily.

A Highly Critical Role — Agile Coach

Agile Coaches are integral members of any agile team. The coach ensures that the team is following the principles of agile development and helps them to overcome obstacles. They offer mentorship and advice when needed but also allow teams to self-organize in order to achieve their goals in an efficient manner. The role of the agile coach is impartial, unbiased, and highly critical to success.

Along with some specific challenges for the agile teams during the pandemic, there are several advantages of working at home and we saw that it can be a successful model. Building the team is only the first step, we also need to discuss coordination, collaboration and communication, agile practices, agility, emotions and feelings, leadership, productivity, and quality aspects.

Let me know about your challenges, leave your comments..