Stable team

…collaborative product discovery with multiple development teams.

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Quality, predictability and sustainability are highly valued by clients and the market.

Any product owner wants sharp and focused development teams that are:

• stable;
• predictable;
• co-located (obeya);
• sustainable paced;
• t-shaped—both the team and its members;
• resilient, i.e. having a moderate truck number.

Productivity differences of stable teams are huge and increase:

• quality of work;
• satisfaction;
• joy in work stuff;
• customer delight;
• customer satisfaction

Customer delight drives profitability and gives reason for existence.

As with all good teams, everyone is !rst accountable for the teams gear, followed by their teammates gear, and !nally their personal gear. This assures that no-one stands around waiting for the team to get ready, or for the team to clean and stow their gear after the session.

Therefore:

Evolve stable, resilient, co-located, and multi-disciplinary development teams. Don't let anyone touch it. In scrum, the product owner and scrum master will aggressively push back on anything that can potentially disrupt the team dynamic and high communication bandwidth in hyperproductive teams.

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Make every development team and community of practice or guild create and evolve a team charter. Cultivate the stable team in an obeya. Use a unity of purpose to give direction, align forces, and pursue meaningful work.

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The book The Wisdom of Teams by Jon Katzenbach, Douglas Smith identifies six basic requirements for good teamwork:

1. six plus or minus one team members.
2. diverse skills to create resilience and completeness.
3. big hairy audacious goal, shared, to align all forces.
4. team charter to create a container that facilitates self-organization.
5. disciplined autonomy to foster mutual accountability.
6. unity of purpose to give direction, align forces, and pursue meaningful work.

New

About ask for help when working in teams:

Being great means not accepting the old way of doing things. Being great requires that you intentionally change your behavior after thinking about the ideal way to behave, and then following through with courage.

—Jim and Michele McCarthy

From HBR » What New Team Leaders Should Do First (see reference below):

1. Get to know each other
2. Show what you stand for
3. Explain how you want the team to work
4. Set or clarify goals
5. Keep your door open
6. Score an “early win”

Principles for Team Leads

Do:

• Be clear about what goes into your decision making and how you’ll evaluate the team’s progress
• Encourage team members to connect — better communication early on will help avoid misunderstandings and poor results later
• Look for roadblocks or grievances you can fix — it will earn you capital and inspire the team

Do not:

• Jump into trying to accomplish the work without building relationships with the team
• Assume that new team members understand how you or others work ­— take the time to explain processes and expectations.
• Be afraid to communicate often early on — you can always pull back when the team is working well

Sources

• XP?
• Organizational Pattern Language?
• http://www.infoq.com/news/2013/04/stable-teams
• http://blogs.hbr.org/hmu/2013/08/how-to-reward-your-stellar-tea.html
• http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/taking-over-from-an-incompetent-team-leader/

• https://hbr.org/2014/11/what-high-performers-want-at-work
• re:Work » Julia Rozovsky » The five keys to a successful Google team
• InfoQ » Ben Linders » Nurturing and Growing Agile Teams
• InfoQ » Sigi Kaltenecker, Peter Hundermark » What Are Self-Organising Teams?
• HBR » Nilofer Merchant » Teams Can’t Innovate If They’re Too Comfortable
• HBR » Carolyn O'Hara » What New Team Leaders Should Do First
• Roger Schwarz & Associates » Roger Schwarz » Articles about Mindset. Behavior. Results., thoughtful, practical guidance for leaders and teams that want to be more effective.
• The New York Times » Anita Woolley, Thomas W. Malone, Christopher Chabris » Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others
• Crisp » Henrik Kniberg » Is your team cross-functional enough?
• The Modern Team » Cyrus Molavi » What’s The Optimal Team Size For Workplace Productivity?

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