6 powerful ways to build an amazing agile team
This is a guest post written by Kat Boogaard, a writer for Toggl who covers a little bit of everything — but places most of her focus on career, communication, and self-development topics.
So you want your agile team to be amazing. Who can blame you? It’s human nature to want to build something awesome. We have grand aspirations for our teams, especially when they’re just starting to take shape.
You’ve probably heard several quick tips for agile. Get training on the basic principles… Hold daily stand-ups standing up… Don’t demo stuff that’s not done… Agree on a definition of “done”… etc. All of which is good advice. But these are surface-level tips that apply to most (if not all) agile teams.
Unfortunately, there’s no magic recipe for becoming a top-notch team. And that’s fine. Agile is supposed to look a little different for each team depending on its circumstances.
To unlock your team’s capacity for the amazing, you have to go beyond the surface. Don’t just airbrush a kanban board onto the wall and call it a day. Build those deep muscles that let you tackle challenging situations and come out the other side unscathed.
Below are six habits that will help your agile team be amazing.
1. Treat patience as a virtue.
When you think of an amazing agile team, you likely think of something that functions like a well-oiled machine. And, in an ideal world, that’s how things should work. But that doesn’t mean everything works smoothly right from the get-go.
It takes a while to get a feel for how people work together and to fall into a system that really flows — that concept holds true whether you’re working as part of an agile team or not. And according to Tuckman’s “Stages of Group Development”, teams go through several phases: forming, storming, norming, and performing. This process naturally takes time.
So, don’t get bent out of shape thinking that your team is doomed for failure simply because there are still a few kinks to work out. Patience is a virtue.
Take action: Make sure retrospectives are part of your routine. They help identify where the pain points are, and give everyone on your team a chance to be heard. And for teams just forming, try running a rules of engagement exercise –– here’s how.
2. Stay flexible… to a point.
Agile would be much easier if you could simply set everything in stone, and then know that things would remain exactly the same forever, right? But, as you already know, that’s just not the way it works.
Change is inevitable. And, a common trait amongst healthy, high-performing agile teams is the ability to adapt to changes, rather than always staying committed to an existing plan. The best teams constantly reevaluate their priorities and shift their resources accordingly.
Yes, agile relies heavily on order and organization. But you can’t be so rigid that there’s no flexibility for you to roll with the punches. There’s a happy medium somewhere between chaos and confinement where agile teams thrive. And nobody knows better than you where that point lays for your team.
Take action: Run a trade-off sliders exercise at the start of each major project, or periodically throughout the year. You’ll be able to make quick, smart adjustments when change inevitably comes knocking. New to trade-off sliders? Here’s how.
3. Focus on results.
The beauty of an agile team is that it focuses more on results, rather than obsessing over processes and procedures. It’s not about a certain output of effort. It’s about outcomes.
By placing more emphasis on the results, team members feel empowered to make decisions, solve problems, and develop innovative solutions using whatever skills and expertise they have.
It doesn’t matter what type of team you’re working on — everybody likes to feel trusted, valued, and empowered to get work done.
Take action: Use the goals, signals, and measures exercise to build consensus on what your objectives really are and how you’ll know when you’ve met them. Here’s how.
4. Set goals that require the whole team’s participation.
What’s the key word in “agile team”? You might immediately conclude it’s “agile”, but the operative word there is actually “team”.
In a traditional team, it’s easy to get tunnel vision, focusing exclusively on your individual responsibilities. However, this just won’t work when you’re part of an agile team.
In order to be successful, you need to create an culture where everyone is held accountable to team-level goals — not just their individual goals or contributions. This allows every team member to recognize that their efforts are contributing to the bigger picture, while also reaffirming the entire team concept. You either fail together, or succeed together.
Take action: Map out the interactions within your team, and with other teams, using a roles and responsibilities exercise. You’ll uncover gaps in coverage, as well as areas where you may be duplicating efforts. Here’s the step-by-step.
“Amazing agile teams create a culture of team-level goals and whole-team accountability.”
5. Seek and incorporate feedback.
Here’s the cold, hard truth: it doesn’t matter how streamlined your processes are, or how fast you’re able to churn out software, if you aren’t actually creating the right product. And, the only way to know that you’re on the right track is to gather lots and lots of feedback.
Successful agile teams have systems and methods in place to get their software out in front of customers as soon as possible so that they can collect feedback early on and incorporate it into the product.
Beyond customer feedback, great teams are also extremely transparent with each other. They don’t sweep problems under the rug. They remain completely honest and view any blunders or roadblocks as opportunities to continuously learn and ultimately improve. Holding retrospectives can help a lot to achieve that.
Take action: Before you ship, use the sparring technique to get structured feedback on designs and functionality. Once you’re live, hold customer interviews to understand how your product is being used in the wild. New to sparring? Get instructions here–wooden sword optional ;-)
6. Trust like you’ve never trusted before.
You knew this had to appear on the list somewhere, didn’t you? Ultimately, an agile team is nothing without trust. It’s essential, and it all comes back to the core concept of truly functioning as a team.
Every member of the team needs to trust that others will hold up their ends of the bargain and get things done when and how they said they would do them.
Becoming an awesome agile team isn’t just a pipe dream — it’s totally doable, as long as you implement these key strategies and remain patient. Give it a try, and prepare to be amazed.
Take action: Being open and vulnerable with your team builds trust. But it takes practice! Use the Team Health Monitor as a way to encourage honest conversations and understand how the health of your team changes over time. Here’s how to run a Health Monitor.
7. (Bonus item!) Write your own definition of success.
You know how five story points on one team might be equivalent to eight points on another team? It’s because each team calibrates their scale for estimating differently. This is why it’s pointless (even dangerous) to judge two agile teams based on who completes more story points each sprint.
Similarly, each team should calibrate their own measures of success. If your company is just transitioning to agile, simply getting through a sprint without major disruptions or roadblocks is a huge win. For a mature agile team, nothing short of a textbook burn-down chart might feel like victory.
So resist the temptation to judge your team’s progress by someone else’s yardstick. Focus on your needs. Your goals. You’ll be a healthier team with happier customers.
Wouldn’t that be amazing?
If you liked this story, be sure to follow Smells Like Team Spirit — our publication dedicated to taking the “work” out of teamwork, one story at a time.
Originally published at Atlassian Blogs.
