A Simple Strategy for improving team agility
Create the next level of team agility using a Network-based competency Structure
Stephen Denning in his book The Age of Agile outlines three ‘Laws of Agility’:
- The Law of the Small Team states that the complex tasks are best done by small cross-functional autonomous teams
- The Law of the Customer states that the organisations exist to serve the customer and not the stakeholders. This is a fundamental shift from the previous view that the organisations exist to maximise the value for their shareholder
- The Law of the Network states that a network is a set of teams that interact with and collaborate with other teams with the same connectivity, interaction, and passion as they do within their own small team
In this blog, I will talk about how we have used the two laws (Law of the small team and Law of Network) to take our team to the next level of agility. These two laws can be applied by any team to take the team to the next level. Here’s how.
Law of the small team — Define smaller teams within your team
At Lapis, we created small teams based on competencies within our larger development team. We first identified four areas of competencies based on the work we do, and the skills and interests of our team members. The four areas are:
- UI/UX or Front-end Technologies
- API or Backend Technologies
- DevOps — All things related to DevOps including Cloud-based Services in AWS and Azure
- QA/BA — All things related to software testing and business analysis
Each team is encouraged to ‘own’ their competency area and work internally to solve complex problems and champion improvements. As per the law of the Small Team’, this helps us achieve the greatest outcome as a collective.
Law of the Network — Small teams talking to each other
We then bring in ‘Law of the Network’ with our small teams sharing their learnings and ideas with other groups. This strengthens the overarching organisational capability and helps us perform better overall as a broader team.
Below is a diagram of our small teams and competency-based network implementation.
This implementation has created a powerful mechanism for people to work on issues and improvements, and create a network across the organisation with other areas of competencies.
It has also helped us move away from hierarchical-based thinking — that only senior members of the team or team members with the right title are responsible for making important decisions. It is now the responsibility of the competency area team. Other areas of competencies are there to support and together, they lift the capability of the whole organisation.
For us, this implementation has added another level of agility and significantly improved our team’s capability to deliver continuous value to our clients. Give it a go — your team will be better for it.
Hi, I’m Imran, Business Manager at Lapis, and I’m passionate about creating high-performing teams. Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Reference: The Age of Agile by Stephen Denning
