A team who adopts agile methodology can gain many advantages for the business they operate within.
An agile team can increate customer satisfaction, can harbour daily cooperation between developers, suppliers and business people. An agile team drives adaptation to any changing business circumstance.
An agile team has many productivity advantages and is the life-line of any organization. Keep reading to learn how to start an Agile team yourself.
What is an Agile team?
The first value of the agile manifesto is “value individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. An Agile team is a multi-functional group of people who have the correct constitution, the required experience, skills and qualities to produce a functional product or increment of product.
Being an Agile team member will allow you to build the skills needed to become a high-performing member, creating safe for teams advantage and collaborating.
Agile teams are not just found in IT and Software Development, HR, Finance, Operations, and more can benefit from the construct and principles of agile teams.
Forming an Agile Team
It doesn’t happen overnight. As with all team formations, they take time to settle down. Agile is built and delivered in Sprints, smaller periods of time with smaller increments of functionality over regular release cadences.
This will help you; it won’t take you too long to spot a dysfunctional team. Don’t be afraid, in the very early stages, to move team members from one team to another – but do not sustain this pattern – rather focus on fixing the teams then breaking them up all the time!
So, Why an Agile Team?
There are only two reasons a team needs to be reconstituted, language or culture. Teams are made of people, but if they can’t communicate then we are in trouble before we start.
Agile Teams monitor how they are functioning and make the adjustments if needed impossible if a team’s make-up changes too often. Agile teams, whilst self-organizing, do not function in isolation; they require continuous mentoring. In this context, mentoring is not just senior team members showing junior team members the way; in fact, mentoring in agile teams is about everyone learning from everyone else.
Guard against the appearance of a team spokesperson. The entire agile team must have a voice. Use the daily stand up sessions to get input from all team members. Each team member must talk to their own work unless extenuating circumstances warrant otherwise – perhaps a team member needed to go to the doctor.
Agile teams must be built on solid engineering best practices with IT agile teams these could be code reviews, good design, continuous integration, and frequent releases. If the principles are not part of the practice, then the team will be destined to fail.
People (team members) matter! Cohesive teams where people focus on working in a self-organizing manner will deliver. Great agile teams are shaped around products or features. But just like individuals, agile team members need to be given some time to get to know themselves and grow.
Agile For the Win
An Agile team is multidisciplinary, this makes the team stronger as a whole than the sum of the individual capabilities and skillsets. Shared and diverse skill sets within the team elevate the team’s capability; it is the team that makes the commitments for delivery and not any one individual in the team.
There is no “them and us” in an agile team; for example, an IT Agile Team should have a business represented in the team by the product owner.
