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Agile Teams: Slides

AGILE Teams: Slides

Audience:
New teams
Existing teams
Leaders
Non-practitioners
Objectives:
Understand how Agile teams are constructed differently from historical practices
Understanding of roles: how they partner to do work changes, their work does not
Flow of work from a team perspective
Discuss the positive impact of ‘being at the table’ for team members

Agile requires a different kind of team
Team members need to take greater functional ownership and be 100% dedicated
Team members need to be proactive in their approach to problems and deliverables removing obstacles quickly
Team members need to willingly collaborate within the team and with others while stretching themselves to develop skills
Team members need the ability to lead without authority and need to be able to negotiate using data to inform decision making

Common Agile team roles
Scrum master
Upholds & reinforces principles
Challenges team(s) to improve the way that they work together and with others
Protects and serves the team
Product owner
Sets direction and priorities
Represents customers interest in all scope trade-offs
Removes obstacles
Release management
Stakeholder relationships
Development team
Comprised of people with the skills and empowerment necessary to achieve the team objectives
Business analyst
Helps discover the goals and needs of the customer
May write, document, and align acceptance criteria
Clarifies ambiguity and captures business rules
Developer
Estimates complexity of work
Determines how to achieve work (and shares expertise)
Writes code and unit tests
Verifies their code satisfies acceptance criteria
QA testing
Prevents defects from entering the system (rather than finding them in regression)
Writes tests plans; continually integrates code for functional level regression testing
Others
Architects provide technical direction
Designers create map and integrate human features
Analysts provide data and analytics for optimal products
All - Strives to be better than they were yesterday every day. Everyone in an Agile Team is first and foremost an Agile Team Member
PMs: Work across teams - Brings a cross-team viewpoint of the work, skills in connecting people, breaking down barriers, budgeting and forecasting, EPM expertise; which are all essential to achieve organizational goals and objectives. They also help engage other areas where the team may have dependencies, and can be instrumental in to the product owner in helping remove barriers.
The goal is always to build the RIGHT teams for the work. To do this, we need to identify the right team construct for that work with a focus and priority on minimizing dependencies – which is dependent on a few things we’ll get to later.

The project manager: a different, valuable perspective
Brings a cross-team viewpoint of the work, skills in connecting people, breaking down barriers, budgeting and forecasting, EPM expertise; which are all essential to achieve organizational goals and objectives.
Delivering business outcomes
Alignment and traceability to project KPI
Schedule synchronization
Organizational awareness
Customer collaboration
Meeting customer expectations
Being responsive to feedback
Using their relationships to advance customer goals
Focusing on individuals and interactions
Guiding and motivating others
Relationship management with stakeholders
Supports work and influences relationships toward value creation
Managing risk and responding to change
Anticipates risk, manages and escalate when appropriate
Fostering clear Decision Making
Adapting and responding to change
Managing compliance to corporate controls and deliverables

Agile teams work differently – common scrum framework
(diagram of Scrum Team and Sprint)
As you experienced, teams work differently


Quick plans
People self-assign work based on skills and interests
Collaboration occurs!
Teams inspect and adapt – what worked, what didn’t, what should we do differently?
These common behaviors align with the five core sprint ceremonies.

And positive team member outcomes…
Autonomy
Mastery
Purpose
Team member engagement goes up
When engagement goes up, creativity goes up
When engagement and creativity go up, productivity and innovation flourish