Building and Scaling up your Agile Teams
Congrats! You have gotten your budget and headcounts to start your Agile development and finally begin your Agile transformation journey!
But wait, how should you actually get started? How to create your first team? How many teams do you need eventually? How do you scale up your team into multiple teams?
Securing the resources is only the first step of the journey, there are many exciting steps ahead as you are building up and growing your Agile teams to become self-managing and high-performing. Hope that this article can provide some clarity on these steps and help you in your Agile transformation journey ahead!
A Typical Scrum Team
The ideal team size is between 3 and 9 people, not including the ScrumMaster and Product Owner. Any smaller and the team couldn’t accomplish enough each sprint. Any larger and communication becomes complex and cumbersome.
An example of a Scrum team is as follow:
- ScrumMaster
- Tech Lead
- 1 Designer
- 2 to 4 Software Engineers
- 1 to 2 Quality Engineers
- 1 DevOps Engineers
Forming the Pioneer Team
First will need to find the team leads — ScrumMaster and Tech Lead. The team leads will be responsible for sourcing, interviewing and hiring new members who have the right competency, commitment and culture-fit to form a cross-functional team. For a start, the team leads will also be responsible to set the right team expectation, so as to build a culture of growth and collaboration. As new people join the team, the team leads will work closely with the new members, coaching and finding suitable opportunities to grow in both technical and soft areas.
With the right culture in place and focusing on people development, the team will be able to grow and learn together effectively, that in turn will facilitate the progression from forming, storming, norming to performing stages. Once the team reaches the norming and performing stages, most members should have a high level of competency and commitment, and so the pioneer team should have become self-managing.
Forming the Second Team
When forming the second team, many may think it is only a question of increasing manpower that can be achieved by just hiring more people. Unfortunately, this is often not true, as manpower is important but there are other important considerations in order for the second team to be successful.
Some examples are as follow:
- Business domain and new processes that are harmonized so far
- New system design and implementation that is so far
- Important stakeholder connections that are crucial for project success
With this in mind, it will be better to find team leads — ScrumMaster and Tech Lead — from the pioneer team, as the members will already equip with the right understanding. Besides having high competence and commitment, team leads will also need to have leadership quality, and most importantly having the passion to grow teams and develop people.
When the team leads for the second team are found, they will begin sourcing, interviewing and hiring the new members just like when setting up the pioneer team. When the new hire joins, they will not go to form the second team straight away. Instead, they will join the pioneer team first, so as to learn what has been done so far to bring over to the second team.
Once all the members of the second team have been onboarded and ready, the pioneer team will split into two teams — Pioneer team & Second team — each having their own product owner, team leads and members with the necessary skillsets to run independently and eventually become self-managing.
Forming the Third Team or more
The process is similar to forming the second team — finding team leads from the existing team, hiring new members into the existing team and then split into two new teams.
Summary
- Find the team leads for the pioneer team.
- The team leads will hire new members into the pioneer team.
- When forming the second team or more, find the new team leads from the existing team.
- The new team leads will hire new members into the existing teams for knowledge transfer.
- When the team size and people are ready, the existing team will split into two independent teams.
If you’re interested in what we do, we are hiring! Just drop me a note at poh_kah_kong@tech.gov.sg to find out more!😊
