How to Scale-up the Team using External Squads without loosing Agile principles and Company culture?

When you watch Spotfy Agile five minutes video it seems to be easy to set up new squads and maintain principles, culture and performance. But it is not so easy. Through these few words I will share our team experience and lessons learned.

Last year our team had the challenge to set up a couple of new external squads to deliver new products in a short period of time. The squads would work outside BTG, outsourcing Company or remotely, and would need to deliver key products to the business.

Main Challenges and what we did to be successful on them:

Short time to start the project.

The strategy to reduce the time to start the project was to use outsourcing companies that quickly onboarded new teams. Instead of being outsourced, we made interviews to assure the staff qualifies.

Squad format.

We decided that one Scrum Master, three Devs and one QA were the best format to achieve our goals. The Product Owner was internal and needed to be too much closer to the outsourced team. I had done some works with squads without QA in the past and after this experience I realized the importance to have people focused on quality.

Introduce new people to our environment. Knowledge transfer.

It was an important lesson learned. As soon we had the team ready to start we had one week of locally inception with PO, Scrum Master and Dev Team. We used techniques detailed on “Lean Inception: How to Align People and Build the Right Product, Paulo Caroli” book. After that week, we had an MVP and user stories ready to begin!

Together, but far from each other.

Remember that the team was not working locally. How to keep the performance and manage the team closer? It was before Covid-19 and work remotely was still a rare practice to us.

Here we need to stop to remember some agile principles ant the concept of Squad introduced by Spotfy. Squad = Cross Functional and Self-Organized Team. If you need to micromanage the team, it is not a Squad that we want.

As Leaders, we need to give the squad mission and the Sprint goals and trust on the team. We need to say What we need to achieve and give to the teams all the support. The Squad needs to say How we will achieve the goals and work together to accomplish them. Rarely it works like that on first or second sprint. That is why one of the most important meetings to me is the Retrospective. On this ceremony the team will do the continuous improvement and reach the maturity that we need.

Rewards and retains high-performance workers.

Our Company has a Partnership and Meritocracy culture. How to extend that to the external teams? We negotiated to the outsourced Companies to give a salary compensation to the squad each successful production delivers. Therefore, the team was much more motivated. It is what we call a will-will negotiation. In addition, we gave autonomy to the the team to give ideas and to build the product together. This has given the team the feeling of ownership. Actually the team felt that they were really part of all of that.

Celebrate Achievements.

Last but not least, the one I love more. Sometimes you work so hard and go to the next project without sharing good news and celebrating all the effort you had done. In my opinion, when the team celebrates together, they show gratitude to the people who helped them to make it happened. It is the opportunity to spread positiveness and happiness. Those two words are keys to success, but this subject may be stuff to a next article.