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

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/
• InfoQ » Sigi Kaltenecker, Peter Hundermark » What Are Self-Organising Teams?
• HBR » Nilofer Merchant » Teams Can’t Innovate If They’re Too Comfortable

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