Exploring Agile Teams

It’s my privilege to be on the Client Services team at Sundog. Recently we’ve had personality training (called “Insights”) as a way of fostering an even stronger team environment. This has got me thinking about what I’ve learned from Agile project management methods regarding creating and building cohesive and healthy teams.

Through my experience, I have found that a great team as a group of people who have a shared vision and because they work with their hearts and their heads, they are able to grow through their human interactions while focusing on creating something fantastic.

There are times I believe the commonly shared conception of a team has a negative mental connotation; when people hear the word “team”, the mental picture is of a dysfunctional family. You have the roles of designer, web dev, PM, QA… but implicit is the expectation of psycho-social roles such as slacker, magician, nag, and overachiever.

Larry Winget said there are no such things as team players, only super stars who are out to do well for themselves. In his book “It’s Called Work for a Reason”, he says he’d rather have a group of super stars each looking out for their own interests. With all due respect to Mr. Winget, I wonder if he’d change his message if he worked with some of the Agile teams I’ve been privileged to be in. A key factor in the increased productivity you see with Agile is its self-managing teams.

Self-managed teams are a specific type of team that maintains a high degree of collaboration, and manages itself, with the goal of becoming a very high-performing team. In self-managed teams, trust grows among the team members as work progresses, and they become motivated to accept more difficult challenges. The focus in these types of groups is on performance, as well as on teamwork. Their success requires strong personal and company commitment, skills development, and support from team members and management. 
“Self-managed teams can result in increased productivity”
By Tom Mochal, Special to ZDNet Asia

Agile methods have evolved because of the need to get things done in an efficient manner. In the process, it’s been observed that getting things done is not really a result of a solid specifications document, backlog management, velocity, elegant code, or thorough QA. How productive and effective we are as a group is directly related to how efficiently we communicate with each other. If we carry and create internal baggage, we are not going to reach our optimal productivity in our external lives.

Efficient communication means listening, speaking, attending and writing in a way that is aligned with our human needs as well as the overall project vision. If we’re not right with ourselves and with each other, the emotional and mental churn will distract us from the task at hand.
It’s notable that the Agile Manifesto directly relates to how we work together.

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

My definition of a successful team is one that has an ongoing sense of passion at new ideas and at doing things well, which meets project success criteria while having fun and that doesn’t shy away from a challenge. Some hallmarks of a healthy team, in my opinion, are feedback, emotions, dignity, and enthusiasm that get translated into the team output (products and services). Another is the ability to reach consensus through discussion and the open exchange of ideas. The team supports quality thinking by accepting challenges and by demonstrating work and ideas. Design iterations are also strengthened in this way.

So what are some good rules of thumb for this type of successful team? Here are some of my observations of the personal and team commitments, or “norms”, we make in a healthy Agile team that contribute to a successful project and culture.
• We will be present and stay engaged with the conversation (both contributing and receiving).
• We are each accountable for creating quality in our sphere of influence.
• We put our “selves” aside in favor of quality.
• We seek to understand more than being understood.
• We will act and speak rationally and in a results-oriented manner.

That is not to say that problems do not come up in an Agile team. We still need to do inventories of what is and isn’t working and then try new things. The December 2008 issue of the Agile Journal is focused on handling conflict in Agile teams. I enjoyed the article, Group Coherence for Project Teams - A Search for Hyper-Productivity. I also highly recommend the book, Agile Retrospectives.

There is a fantastic list of Agile team practices compiled on a blog, Leading Answers by Mike Griffiths. I’ll recap here, but please take the time to visit his blog and read the article: Top 10 Team Practices
1. Empower them
2. Listen to them
3. Trust them to get the job done and solve problems
4. Judge when to step in/away
5. Create productive workspace for them
6. Provide support for them
7. Encourage reflection and adaptation
8. Reward and recognize them
9. Communications
10. Align objectives and promote people

Not only does learning and practicing Agile team methods help teams achieve, we evolve as people. (This blog shows the extent to which Agile can be embraced on an individual level: Agile Personal Development.) Being a part of an Agile team has given me insight into myself, which is necessary before I can have insight into others and develop further leadership skills. I’ve learned to macro-manage, to collaborate, to inspire, to confront, to brainstorm, and which battles to fight in order to win the war. Most and best of all, I have so much fun at work with my teams, there are days when I cannot believe I get paid to do this stuff.

On an ending note, Fumihiko Kinoshita created an impressive presentation deck on the Practices of an Agile Team. It’s straightforward, creative, humorous, and elegant – just like any good Agile team!