How a Stable Team Grows in Capability

Resist the urge to move team members to the work.

In contrast to Agile leadership values, the basic belief of traditional management is to locally optimize a team to gain efficiency. For instance, optimal teams are believed to be functional teams who are homogeneous experts in architecture, requirements gathering, software design, front-end development, database development, back-end development, testing, deployment, or support. The premise is that these teams refine their skill and they are the best to perform a particular job. As this thinking propagates, silos are created and local optimization prevails. This is management thinking and not the Agile leadership that is desired.

Alternatively, systems thinking and Scrum suggest that we optimize through a stable, long-lived, cross-functional, and increasingly T-Shaped team, creating interactions and teamwork to produce an outcome that is much greater than the outcomes possible from the individual people on the team.

The Scenario

Figure A — The Scenario: Team A needs a skill from Team B

Consider this scenario. On a product team operating in the Scrum Framework, Team A is missing a skill to perform its…